Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Scott Galloway on Why America Is Adrift and How to Fix It EP 218

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Today I talk to Scott Galloway (@profgalloway), a Professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and a Serial entrepreneur. While the current economic and social crisis in America seems complex, Galloway and I discuss how it can be fixed and examine the country's future in his new NY Times bestselling book "Adrift: America in 100 Charts."  What We Discuss with Scott Galloway Galloway and Miles explore the history of the US and argue that despite its undeniable strengths, it is on a path toward self-destruction. Drawing on a wealth of original data, graphs, and analysis, they outline a series of recommendations for restoring order and national purpose. This must-listen-to analysis offers a powerful indictment of the state of US politics and society and a compelling blueprint for how to restore the nation’s greatness. -►Purchase Adrift: America in 100 Charts: https://amzn.to/3EQOt0E   (Amazon Link) Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/scott-galloway-america-is-adrift/  Brought to you by BiOptimizers and American Giant. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/iJ26GIRQqAM  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Did you hear my interview with Robin Sharma, one of the top personal mastery and leadership coaches in the world and a multiple-time number-one New York Times best-selling author? Catch up with episode 209: Robin Sharma on Why Changing the World Starts by Changing Ourselves ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/   

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. Unfortunately, there's an economic incentive around turning us into Tyrannosaurus Rexes where we're drawn towards movement and violence, rather than having a civil conversation. And of all these problems, whether it's teen depression, whether it's failing young men, income inequality, exploding costs in higher education, the problem I would argue is the biggest problem relative to the attention it's getting. Is it if America's problems are a horror movie, you would say the call is coming from inside the house. And that is a third of each political party sees the other

party as their mortal enemy. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, Jon Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.

Now, let's go out there and become Passion Struck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 218 of Passion Struck. Ranked by Apple is one of the top 20 health podcasts. And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly. And listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. Or you would like to introduce this to a friend or family member we now have episode starter facts, which are collections

of our fans favorite episodes that we organize in the convenient topics to give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show. Just go to passionstruck.com slash starderpacks or Spotify to get started. And in case you missed my episodes from last week, we had two amazing book launches. The first was with Arward Professor Max H. Bezerman and we discussed discuss his brand new book, Complicit. I also had on another Harvard professor, neuroscientist and psychiatrist, Chris Palmer, and we discuss his brand new book, Brain Energy. And my solo episode last week was on the science and motivation in eight ways that you can become and stay motivated. Please check them all out. I also wanted to say thank you so much

for your continued ratings and reviews, which goes such a long way for helping us boost our rating but more importantly grow the passion for our community. Now let's talk about today's episode. We are now coming to grips with our post-pandemic future. We are faced with overwhelming political extremism, quiet quitting in the great resignation which are affecting organizations everywhere as well as supply chain problems, which are crushing company profits. This raises some daunting questions.

Is American democracy under attack? How will technology continue to alter our lives? What does the future of work look like for me? America and the world are on the cusp of enormous change. This change will not only disrupt the world economy as we see today playing out all around us, but is also destroying the financial backbone of our country and many around the world, the middle class. But how did we get to this precipice? Where are we heading and what will we become? Our guest today, Scott Galloway, tackles this and

so much more in his new book, A Drift. Scott is an NYU Stern School of Business, Professor of Marketing, and a serial entrepreneur. He's the best-selling author of Post-Corona, the four in the Algebra of Happiness. And formerly was on the boards of the New York Times Company, Urban Outfitters, and Berkeley Hosses School of Business. His Pref G, Impivot Podcasts, No Mercy, No Malice Blog, and Prof. G, YouTube Channel, Reach Millions. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely ecstatic to welcome Scott Galloway to the PassionStruck podcast. Welcome Scott.

Thanks for having me, John. Well, I wanted to congratulate you on your new book, A Drift. I'll make sure in our YouTube we put a big picture of it, but I found it to be an extremely well-written, compelling vision of what America looks like today with some great ideas on the path that we can take going forward. So congratulations on that. Oh, thanks for saying that. Yeah, I enjoyed writing it. Well, I like to start out these interviews by allowing the audience to get to know you if they're not familiar with you. And a question I like to use is we all have different defining moments in our life. What is a moment or moments that defined who you are today? The kind of seminal moment in my life in terms of my behavior from that point forward

and the way I viewed the world was when my first son was born. Am you supposed to feel or I thought after watching all these Hallmark channel movies about birth that I'd be immediately in love with this thing and feel this sense of awe and wonder and love for it. And I just felt a lot of fear and anxiety around the need to get my shit together and make more money and have a more consistent professional life. And because of just all of a sudden, don't on me that for the first time in my life and I kids later it wasn't all about me. And it got me focused. I think it's the first time you're really an adult and that is you think about someone else more than yourself. But that kind of

changed in terms of who I am now, what most of my actions bubble up to, it's that I want to be a good dad, I want to provide economic security for my family, and it focuses me, but that was home and where everything changed if you well, John. Yeah, I know for me, the birth of my own son, who's now 24, was a pretty pinnacle moment for many of the same reasons. I was at the point of transitioning from the military and at that point, I thought I was going to go in the FBI and literally a week before I was supposed to join Quantico, there was a congressional funding shortfall

and so my class got recycled. And so here I am with no plan B, a family to support everything else and it really dawned on me, similar to you from that point forward, that I really have to be on my A game to support not only me, but this family I'm creating. So I can resonate that with that very well. Yeah, it's these healthy instincts kick in and when you're single and it's just you, your failure is a private. I'm a reasonably talented guy. I was thought I could make a living. I was made enough money to have nice clothes and

a big TV and a decent place to live and have nice vacations. But there's no dancing between the rain jobs once you have kids. They just, they can't sleep on a couch. And just and only that, just not only beyond economics, I just been so good at getting selfish. And there's something also really rewarding about kids that I wasn't expecting. And that is started Thursday and by Friday, I was very focused on what I was going to do to be increasingly fabulous every weekend. What fabulous people was like going to brunch with, what fabulous things was I going to do, who was I going to hang out with, what fabulous stuff was I going to buy. It was just, it wasn't exhausting, it was fun,

but after a long time doing that, it's a bit relaxing, once you have kids, your weekends accept. It's like, okay, we got a birthday party on Saturday, we got soccer practice on Sunday. It's liberating and freeing in some ways, and I'd be thinking about yourself all the time. So I've actually, I've enjoyed it.

It took me a few years to get used to it, but I've enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. I agree with you. And I've been through all those different seasons. Now, my last child just started college. There you go. But so reversal and time. Well, the lens that we do this podcast through is how do you help people create an intentional life? And as I was reading your book, one of the things that Don Don may is we have become as a society and as Americans, very unintentional in many aspects of the way we're leading that life, which I think has been a cornerstone to our country in much of Western society as we know it becoming a drift. But you lay out some pretty shocking statistics on the state of America

and why you feel we were a drift. Can you discuss some of these statistics at a high level and why this is the case? Yeah, there's a lot that ails us, but I think you've got to understand the nuance behind it to begin thinking about addressing those problems. And you know, it's kind of up and down the stack. There's some macro factors that would, I think, some of the problems that did ails. And if you were to try and find epicenters, there's a few. One of them is in the early 70s, something strange happened. And that is up until that point, productivity and wage growth moved in lockstep and that is if the nation became more productive through management techniques or manufacturing technology, what have you,

salaries or wages would rise and approximate proportion with productivity. And then in the 70s the two disarticulated and wage growth is basically on flat for 50 years, but productivity is up into the right. So what we've had is a lot of prosperity, but not a lot of progress. And the delta between productivity and wage growth over the last 50 years amounts to literally trillions of dollars and surplus value

that's been almost entirely captured by shareholders of which 90% by dollar volume is owned by 1%. That's how to bunch of knock-on effects. We have, as people know, and gets a lot of warranted attention, we have tremendous income inequality. We also have this sort of crowding not only to the wealthiest, but to the oldest.

And that is people over the age of 75 or 70% wealth here than they were 40 years ago, people on the age of 40 or about 20% last wealthy. And so what's happened for the first time in our nation's history is that a man or woman at 30 isn't doing as well as his or her mom was at 30. And that's the first time that's happened in our nation's history. And if you think about the fundamental compact where we have taxes, laws, a government, a military, an economy, it's at the end of the day, it's such that the kind of central compact is if I play by the rules, my kids will do better than me.

And for the first time that compact's been broken. And I think a lot of it is that we've engaged, my generation and elegant transfer of wealth from younger people to older people and from the bottom 90% to the top 10%. But when you're talking about the bottom 90%, you're not only talking about lower middle income households, you're talking about the young. And that's the bad news, is there's been tremendous inequality around age and income. The good news is that the incumbents will try and convince us

that is a variety of factors that are beyond our control. And it's not. These problems of our own making, which means they can be unmade. For example, the two biggest tax deductions in America are more of a dangerous rates and capital gains. Who owns stock, owns homes, people my age, who rents and who makes all of their money through current

and commercial or a young people. And we've decided to tax them at a higher rate, then people my age who own stocks or assets get taxed. We have a transfer of wealth of a trillion and a half dollars a year from young people to old people in America and the form of social security. I'm not suggesting we do away with social security, but it's called a tax, not a pension fund. It just feels as if everything, if you look at the major economic policies over the last 20, 30 years. It disproportionately benefits older people and disproportionately ways on younger people.

So the disarticulation of wage growth, you know, productivity is a big one. The other one is the one that doesn't get as much attention is I do think we have a crisis around what I loosely term failing young men. And that is our school system, our educational system is bias against men. And that is primary school K through 12,

boys are twice as likely to be suspended on a behavior adjusted basis. So a boy and a girl in the principal's office for the exact same infraction of boys, twice as likely to be suspended a black boy five times as likely. So there's some societal dynamics. There's also just biological dynamics. A young man's

prefrontal cortex doesn't develop. So two seniors in high school, if it's an 18-year-old girl and a natural boy, the girl is really competing against a 16-year-old. And as a result, seven to ten high school valedictorians, two for every one female to male college graduate. So for every one male college graduate, we're going gonna have two female college graduates. So we have, I would argue that over the last 34 years, we've never seen a cohort fall as fast as we've seen young men. There's been some wonderful things, and it's not a zero, some game.

There's been a leveling up of women in terms of closing the wage gap, at least before they have children. We now have people of color have better representation in higher education, but young men are really struggling. And I think that's the anticomminquality epicenter gets a lot of attention. The failing young man is just starting to get some attention because there's this dangerous gag reflex that if you start talking about the problems with young men in the context of

which it advocate for them or think about policies and programs that help them, it's immediately seen as anti-women. And I think now we're starting to have a more honest conversation. Well, that's not necessarily true. It's not a zero-sum damn. Yes, well, obviously, having kids who are 24 and 18, this is an area that is of much concern to me. And I'm sure with your kids being even younger than that, it's a concern for you as well. I know my son who's 24, one of his biggest concerns is he did go to college. He does have a good job. Now he's thinking about going back and getting his master's degree and he's perplexed because things are changing at such a rapid pace where does he go from now, especially when you look at the future and four to five

hundred million jobs, if not more, are going to change over the next decade or two. So I think another aspect of this that's hitting this generation as well. But in the book, and I just wanted to hit on this age inequality, the statistics that you gave were that someone who was born in 1940 had a 92% chance of doing better than his or her parents. Someone born in 1970 when I was born had a 61% chance, and a millennial born in 1984 would be 37 today only has a 50% chance. If you look at both that age-based inequality that you talked about and then this impact on males and education, what are the long-term ramifications of this if it keeps going the way it is and then what is your recommendation

on how we fix it? Yeah, there's some real knock on effects. And that is, if you look at the most violent, unstable societies in the world, they have one commonality. And that is they have a disproportionate number of young, angry and broke men. And it's usually also they have what's called Porsche polygamy. And that is the wealthiest, desil of men are polygamous. They have multiple wives. And so there's nothing more dangerous

than a young man who has no guardrails in the form of a job, school, or a mate telling him, no, you can't go off and get in fights and no, you need to get a job. Young men need guardrails in the forms of relationships. So when Salman Rosti was attacked on stage a few months ago, I don't think that was about the fatwa. That was about a young man with no prospects living in his mother's

basement. You're also seeing a generation of young men who don't get social skills, especially after COVID or during COVID, they become very disgruntled. They can get a reasonable fact, similarly, of the Dopa hit and reward of relationships of work or of sacks through a Robinhood, video games or porn. And the problem is they become a social and don't develop the skills necessary to become economically or emotionally viable. And I worry that by the time they hit a certain age, they just enter into a tailspin and become so a social

that they begin looking for others to blame. They become more prone to misogynistic content, they become more prone to conspiracy theory, even weird things, they're less likely to believe that climate change is real. And this individual is very unproductive for our society. In addition, you have lower birth rates. You household that don't save as much. Once you get married, you're likely to develop economic security much faster. And I don't want to see all this through the lens of a heteronormative

relationship. It's just two people who decide to become a rationally passionate about each other's well-being. It doesn't matter their sexual orientation. It doesn't even matter if they're not in a traditional marriage. It doesn't even matter if they're in a romantic relationship. Partnership is really the key. Relationships are the key across economic viability and even happiness. I wear there's a lot of factors stacked against men, and a longer conversation is, what

does it mean to be masculine? And I think we need to redefine masculinity as protecting others, developing strength, physical and mental, taking responsibility for the economic well-being of your household, which sometimes means getting out of the way of your partner, who might be better at this whole money thing, but not only that getting out every day and being aggressive around relationships, introducing yourself, asking potential professional contacts or coffee, saying hello to a stranger in the Starbucks line. There's nothing wrong with starting conversation with someone you find attractive.

And if he or she is not interested in you, both of you will get over it. And that is not a crime. There's a difference between trying to initiate a conversation and harassing somebody. And if you don't know the difference, you've got bigger problems. So I worry that too many young people

and too many Americans, more generally, aren't socializing and are bumping up against one another. The number of high school kids that sees their friends every day has been cut in half. We're no longer going to the mall, the movie theater, we're not going to work as often. And as a result, we're just not nearly a social. The number of people joining Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts,

playing an organized sports, even the number of people who speak to their neighbors has declined precipitously. And I think that's a very dangerous crisis in our society. We've destigmatized cancer, we destigmatized mental health. I think we're going to have an increasingly robust conversation around something that's plaguing our society. And that is just loneliness. The number of people who say they don't have a single friend has doubled in the last 20 years. And I think you served. I think of those Japanese soldiers who were left behind in the Philippine Islands and told

to go into the hills and hold the island. And some of them were up there for 10 or 20 years alone. They learned nothing. They accomplished nothing. They would occasionally come down and wreak havoc in a village, but they didn't learn survival techniques. They didn't, there was no spiritual enlightenment. They learned nothing.

And I worry that we aren't investing in the institutions, whether it's parks, sports leagues, what some New York Times tried to refer to as third spaces, opportunities for educational advancement, opportunities for national service, I believe it, and I'm going into solutions now. I believe that we should have some sort of conscription or national service. I look at Israel and I look at some northern European countries that demand service or the young people, and I think it's paid off in spades. I think that there's a tremendous fraying of our connective tissue in terms of what should bind us and that is that we're

all Americans. And in the 50s, 60s and 70s, we just had a much easier time leading and passing legislation that was bipartisan because our elective leaders saw themselves as Americans well before they saw themselves as Republicans or Democrats because they'd all served in the same uniform. So I'd like to see some sort of national service. I'd like to see a serious investment in an expansion of our public universities not only to let in more men but to let in more people of color, more women. When I applied to UCLA, the acceptance rate was 76%, this year it'll be 6%. So colleges become this kind of enforcer, the caste system, where the top 1%, who are 77 times more likely

to get into an elite university than the bottom 99%, and the freakishly remarkable get in, and we try and turn them into billionaires. And I don't think that's what America is about. I think America is about finding unremarkable kids and giving them remarkable opportunities through higher education. In addition, we also need to recognize

that college isn't for everybody. And I would lean on these public universities in exchange for this funding to expand their capacity or their supply through infrastructure and technology investments. We should lean on them to bust out of this traditional liberal arts four-year degree and start thinking about one-year degrees

and specialty construction, 18-month degrees and cybersecurity. LA Unified School District right now has some broad to its knees because of a cyber attack because they can't find anyone to be in cybersecurity for them. We need to break out of this fetishization of an elite university, go to work at Google or KKR. There are a lot of great jobs out there

installing energy-efficient HVAC, trying to figure out a way to repair an electric vehicle. Anyone who's renovated their house knows there's a lot of demand for skilled artisans. In the UK and Germany, if you look at a thousand job titles, 33 of those titles are apprentice. In the United States, it's three. In Germany, 50% of their citizens have some sort of occasional training in the US. It's five. So National Service, a dramatic expansion and rethinking of higher education, to include vocational training. I believe we need to massively simplify the tax code. I'm not saying raise or lower taxes, but the tax code's gone from 400 pages to 4000, which is a transfer of wealth

to the rich because people in my income bracket can afford Sherpas and tax lawyers to navigate the tax code and use it to our advantage. Lower middle income tax audits have been automated, which means they get audited more. And whereas wealthy people's taxes are so complicated now that they can't be automated. So you have an increase in enforcement across lower mental income households and a decrease in enforcement across our wealthiest households. You also have seen tax rates plummet once you get to the 99% tile and I'll stop here because I know there's a bit of a word salad, but it's easy to say poor lower mental income households have taken the brunt of our tax policy and there's some truth to that. But the group that's actually shared the worst

in terms of changes to the tax code over the last 30 years have been what I refer to as the work horses. And that is, take a couple and they played by the rules, they've got good college educations, they work really hard, they're good citizens, and they make between college $200,000 in a million dollars a year. Mom's a partner in a law firm, dad's a Kyle Praktor.

Those individuals usually have to live in an urban center for those types of jobs, usually in a blue state, and they're probably paying an effective tax rate of somewhere between 45 and 54%. And they haven't enough money to live well. No one feels sorry for them. But if they don't make the jump to light speed and have enough money to live well. No one feels sorry for them. But if they don't make the jump to light speed and have enough excess income after paying half their money in taxes and figuring out a way to live a decent life in an urban area, which is usually very expensive, if they're not able to aggregate stocks and apartments and assets such that they can take

them and enjoy their income to capital gains, they get stuck in this very high tax rate. If they make a jump to light speed and they can open nine car tactic facilities and buy apartment buildings and stocks, they're tax rate plummets. So we can max out in terms of taxation at the work horses. And then the thoroughbreds, the people who become very wealthy, the tax rate plummets. So we have a progressive tax structure up until kind of the semi wealthy, and then it plummet and becomes regressive. And I think we should reverse that.

I'm going to comment on a number of things that you just went through. Having had two kids who just went through this college process over the past five to six years, here in Florida, it has become almost next to impossible to get into the University of Florida, which is now ranked in the top five for the first time of all public colleges. But in my daughter's class, which had roughly 400 graduates, I think less than 10 actually got into UF. She was fortunate to, but the competition is so immense. I think she had to have 1,400 or above SATs as just a prerequisite to put that into perspective.

So it, as you're saying, is becoming harder and harder, and I think my son even had a more difficult time. But where I wanted to go with this is, I think we have over the past decades become more and more a society of individualism. You start talking about this in the book back in 1980. And I have to say, I was about 10 at the time. And I remember very little from the Carter

administration. I remember a lot more from the Reagan administration, but you lay it out that during that period of time Reagan did away with liberalism and really shifted the focus to individualism and I recently interviewed Douglas Rushkopf, may know him, but he recently did a book called Survival of the Richest, and whether you agree with the book or not, component of it that I thought was pretty interesting was how the technologies that are grabbing our attention, something else you talk about in the book, have all been made our attention, something else you talk about in the book, have all been made to reward individualism because these social networks really don't get any revenue from getting us to collaborate or to do this in a group setting.

And as you look at the youth that we've been talking about and you brought up loneliness, I recently did an episode on this. There have been two 20-year studies worldwide that have shown 33% of all humans in over 100 countries are lonely. In the United States, 45% of adults have been found to be lonely. And I think this is just causing this disengagement at work and hopelessness and helplessness. So, again, I wanted to ask, what were some of the findings that you found around this attention economy that's happening, and what have been some of the ramifications and how do we fix it? So a lot there, but I just want to comment on the University of Florida, my sister's

sister's University of Florida, I lived in Florida for 10 years. As a nation, we just philosophically have to change our complexion and recognize that we accidentally, I don't think maliciously, became a rejectionist exclusionary culture as evidence by our education. And that is once you have your degree from UF, you applaud the dean and like that it's gotten harder to get into. Because it makes your degree worth more. Once you have a house, you show up to the local architectural board or the planning board and trying to scourge any new development, because that just makes your house worth more. Once you have a tech company, you spend a lot of money on politicians to try and ensure that if you turn into a monopoly,

you're not broken up, such that smaller companies can't emerge. And we all as parents fall into the delusion for a short time that our kids in the top 1%, and that he or she will be the one that gets into UF. And you hear UF graduates, and along with the other grads, say, I would never get in now. And they say it as a source of pride. Well, that means your daughter is not getting in. And we also fall into this illusion or delusion of complexity that they can expand the university that universities will say we can't go bigger if you stacked Harvard's endowment and $100 bills. The height of that stack would be so great that the Virgin Orbital one couldn't clear it.

And yet they led in 1500 students. students. We can scale Google 23% a year, Salesforce 40% a year, we can't scale the University of North Carolina or the University of Colorado more than 0.4% a year. That's how fast our public universities have been growing. There's a lot of data on how expensive it's become, but it's really more a question of access. And what ends up happening is a lot of good kids get end up getting arbitrage down to a second tier school that through cartel pricing that we engage in at universities that make OPEC look like amateur hour, a lot of kids end up paying a Mercedes price for a Hyundai, graduate with a degree that they may not get a return on investment for, but they leave with $150,000 in debt,

which is not only emotionally and psychologically and financially stressful, it's bad for the economy because they become more risk-averse. They're not as likely to get married by a house. So there's a higher ed is a real problem. Now, in terms of the attention economy, anytime you have an asset, transform,

or refined into something more valuable, whether it's oil out of the ground into petroleum or attention into money, there are externalities. There's emissions. And we're finding that the longer you let the externalities go, the more expensive they are to unwind. And we're finding that a climate change. When you take people's attention and use it as a means of serving them ads. What ultimately happens is the way to scale that is through algorithms. And the algorithms aren't malicious. They're not really what you call

benign. They're just totally neutral. Maybe that's the term. They're just totally indifferent. And what they find is that if I can enrage you, you're more likely to come back and be on the platform like longer. Enragement equals engagement. So the algorithms take content that more likely to come back and be on the platform like longer. Enragement equals engagement. So the algorithms take content that's likely to enrage us and promote it and give it more sunlight. So if you say, oh, I'd love to have a conversation around vaccines. What are the potential downsides in everyone's civil? That thread gets some engagement. But if you say, masks don't work and the vaccines have been proven to alter

your DNA, people weigh in support, upset, call you an idiot, the people who disagree with you. And that thread turns into a lot of comments, a lot of Nissan ads and a lot of revenue for the platform. So unfortunately, there's an economic incentive around turning us into Tyrannosaurus Rexes where we're drawn towards movement and violence rather than having a civil conversation.

And of all these problems, whether it's teen depression or that's failing young men, income inequality, exploding costs in higher education, the problem I would argue is the biggest problem relative to the attention it's getting. Is it if America's problems are a horror movie, you would say the call is coming from inside the house. And that is a third of each party, political party, sees the other party as their mortal enemy. 54% of Democrats are worried that kids are going to marry a Republican. It's just we've decided where each other's enemy.

And it's not only dangerous, it's just flat out wrong. Americans' greatest allies will always be other Americans. And we have these platforms that are motivated to continue that division of polarization and then those platforms can be weaponized by bad actors abroad. I believe that the GRU and the CCP are actively pouring fuel. I don't believe I know. I've seen data pouring fuel on the flames of divisiveness that we give, we start the content. We have seen NM Fox, they inflame each other. We elect leaders now, not based on who we think will do the best job representing our interests, but who's most likely to enrage and make the other side look stupid.

And I think that's what people missed about Trump. I think there's a lot of Republicans that really aren't comfortable with his behavior, but it feels really good to have someone constantly dunk on the other side as well as he did. And that's become the new litmus test for voting. So I think this divisiveness, I think us eating ourselves from the inside out is the biggest threat to our society right now. Because if you look at us objectively, comparatively to other nations, Our GDP growth has been as strong as any nation over the last 30 years, but China, and it's probably been more consistent than China's, we are food independent, we're energy independent. If you want to talk about unicorns, we still produce the most valuable companies in the world. What are the most talented, hardest-working people in the

world? I'll have in common. They all want to come here. Objectively, when you look at the United States, compared to our neighbors, our competitors, if you will, we're doing great. Internally, people feel worse about America than they've ever felt. And then we don't trust each other nor do we like each other very much. So I think a huge issue for us,

and everybody has an obligation. How do you take the temperature down? I try not to get back in people's faces on Twitter. Occasionally someone would say something, they'd say something online, and I thought, oh, they're sticking their chin out. I'm going to meet them with a fist of stone, and people love dunking and clapping back. And okay, do I really need to do that?

Isn't part of being a man, occasionally, just showing some grace, and you don't have to respond to every slight. But as a nation, I think we just need to take the temperature down. And I also think we need to figure out a way to hold platforms liable when they spread conspiracy theory. The right would call it censorship. I don't think it's censorship. I think it's creating algorithms that don't give certain information more reach than it would get on its own. If someone wants to say vaccines all to your DNA, I think they should be able to say that.

And one of the hallmarks of a free society is that pretty much anyone can say pretty much anything about pretty much anybody else. I think that's really important. The question is, when you start spreading election misinformation or vaccine information, because it emrages people, because it's so controversial, should that company be insented to give it more reach than it would on its own merits? So I think this internal division and us deciding that the enemy is each other and us deciding that the enemy is each other is our biggest challenge. Well, as I read the book and kind of came throughout all of it, I came to a similar conclusion that I think Seth Godin has come to on climate change.

And that is, I think many of the things that you highlight in the book were that along the way since World War II to where we are now, we fundamentally have changed systems. Many of them in a negative way, such as not spending as much on infrastructure, not spending enough on health care or completely changing the way we were doing healthcare, etc., etc., which over decades have significant ramifications on what we're doing today, offshoreing of labor, another one where we've taken pretty much this huge amount of blue collar work and now middle class work and we've given it away, which I think is one of leading causes

to the income inequality that we're facing now. But myself, I like what you said about that everyone should serve because when I look at it, there are only about 2% of us in America now who are veterans. And I think it would give people a much better appreciation and love of the country having done that. At least it did that for me. But as I got out of the military and my path was I went to booze and co-ended strategy consulting like your KKR. Reference, I then did big four consulting, became a practice leader, went through the

whole Arthur Anderson demise, I actually worked in Houston. And then I went into Fortune 50. And whether I was on this consulting side or the C-suite side of these Fortune 50 companies, the thing that really became apparent was what was driving us was not benefiting the consumer. It was not benefiting the customer. It was not benefiting the employee. Everything was looked at through the lens of creating shareholder value. I think that is one of the largest systems that is fundamentally ruining who we are right now. And it's interesting.

I interviewed Gene Allway. I don't know if you know who she is, but she's the head of Virgin United, Sir Richard Branson's philanthropical arm. But Richard Branson formed a group of leaders, Mark Benioff, he mentions Salesforce. He's one of them, but they're called the B team. And they're trying the B team.

And they're trying to look at how do we set up companies to compete and be valued on something other than shareholder value. And I just wanted to ask you, because I thought you rightly brought it up, why do you think shareholder value has done so much damage, and what would you recommend the counteract it? So it's a complicated question because when we started optimizing in the 70s for just shareholder value, everything was about shareholder value and no longer became about the community and no longer came about trying to build as many jobs as possible. It became about this convenient singular metric of shareholder value and a lot of people now refer to it as many jobs as possible, it became about this convenient, singular metric

of shareholder value. And a lot of people now refer to it as sociopathic economics. So when you started optimizing purely for shareholder value, and you started compensating senior leadership and boards of directors based on the share price, you would, on a moment's notice, if you could, replace humans with machines. And, okay, I'm not a bloodite, but you would not potentially think about keeping a person

because you have to pay payroll taxes on a person, not on a robot. So there's all these economic incentives to not be empathetic to the people who don't own shares. So if you're optimizing for the 1% of the population, that owns 90% of the shares, you can end up with increment of quality, and you're gonna end up with a middle class that's hurting. Now, I'm cynical that I know Mark Banny

often I think the world of them. And I think he's one of those individuals that does think about stakeholder capitalism. I think waiting on the better angels of CEOs and boards is not an effective strategy. What I think you need is a government that doesn't allow companies to take 50% of their profits overseas to tax havens such that they can juice profits

and make more money. I think you need a progressive tax structure. I don't think you should be, I think people who know that their platforms are depressing teen girls who are now engaging in self-harm 80% more often should do perp walks. I think the government needs to step in and do things like, and if they've just done, tax shareholder buybacks, recognizing that we need companies to be more economically incentivized to

invest in growth, new plants, new technologies, more jobs, as opposed to just buying back shares. I love the idea of trying to figure out a mentality in a way to say to corporate America, you have a role and should be thinking about other stakeholders. I'm not convinced it's going to happen. I think that a key component of democracy is this full body contact violence at a corporate level that then creates profits that sits on a bed of empathy, that people elected by our populist

decide how to reinvest in the middle class and make sure that there's dignity and work. I'd like to see $23 an hour minimum wage, which is, why did I get $23? That's how much minimum wage would be if it had just kept pace with inflation or productivity. Why wouldn't all employees across America get to share in the productivity gains of America? Would the stock market go down? Yes. Would certain consumer stocks get hit really hard? Yes. Would some companies, restaurant companies, some services, again, just go out of business? Yes. and it would be worth it. It wouldn't solve

poverty, it wouldn't solve diabetes, it wouldn't solve homelessness, but it would help all of those things. And so optimizing for shareholder value, I like the idea of corporations pretty focused on it, and I don't care how much rhetoric. I think you're always going to have leaders who think about that stuff, but at the end of the day, the for-profit company is there to create economic value. What I think you need is a series of laws and regulations that say, look, Nike FedEx, you can't pay zero tax. We need our best companies to contribute back to the system. Look, Apple, you can't license your intellectual property at Ireland and then charge billions of dollars to the US for that IP thereby increasing the profits in a low tax domain and decreasing profits in a high tax domain. We got to pay for our Navy. We got to pay for Social Security. We got to be more hold these firms that are damaging, especially the ones that seem to be prying on our youth, some of the social media platforms liable.

So I think these problems are solvable without waiting for the better angels of CEOs and boards to show up, because we've been shaming CEOs for 10 and 20 years. We've been talking about responsible capitalism. And I see well-publicized examples of it, but I don't really see it. What I see is a group of individuals in a democracy where you can fly private, have better health care, give your kids more opportunities, have a broader selection set of mates based on how much money you have. And people will always optimize for getting more money and they will come up with rationalizations that compromise their decisions such that

they get more money. And that's part of capitalism. What I think the failure has been is that we have not put in guardrails or insured that when manufacturing is shifted overseas and people are laid off to retrain those people and we have the tax revenue We need 23% of our GDP to run our government So we're running deficits. So call it the total tax burden on everything is 21% Let's say all corporate taxes were 30% and we got to the way with all this ridiculous inversions and offshore tax havens That means you'd need about to get about 15 to 18%

from consumers. So you could have a tax code where you have a flat tax up to 100 of 10% and 20% over $100,000. And I think people would be shocked how low taxes could be if everybody paid them. I want a strategy where our government or elected leaders say the middle class is super important. We're going to reinvest. Let's be honest, we've been weaponized

by corporations and wealthy people. We've created all sorts of loopholes. And it's great that billionaires want to talk about stakeholder capitalism. I don't see it. I think you need systemic, nationwide change that is enforced by laws. That's where I think that's where I think you need systemic nationwide change that is enforced by laws. That's where I think, that's where I think we move the needle. Okay, and I could ask you a million questions because I found your book just so interesting, but I'm going to end on this one. What would you hope a reader or someone who's listening today would take away from a drift? That's a really generous question, John.

One, the most patriotic Americans are veterans like yourself. And the surveys show that because they've invested so much in their country, they're invested in their country. And anyone who has kids can relate to this. By the time your kid's an adult, you've just invested so much in this thing, you can't help but not love it and really be pulling

for your son or daughter's success. And that's how veterans feel about our country. I find the least patriotic are the most blessed in that as our tech innovators. I find that these are the most fortunate people and that the first ones to be critical of our government and say, profane things about our elected leaders or basically the kind of general gestalt or message

from tech leaders to government is, you should just stay out of the way. You're incompetent. And it all started with this Reagan scourge against government. And I find it really obnoxious and really ungrateful. If you look up and down the Pacific coast, you have companies, organizations that

built the value of the GDP of a small Central American nation have obviously SNAP and SpaceX and Los Angeles and you go up North to get to Meta, you get to Google, you get to Salesforce, you go up further North to get Microsoft, you get Amazon. And then something happens just above Seattle. It stops. There's one, Lululemon and Vancouver. And then you go to further south and you get to call calm

And you get to these amazing biotech companies and then something happens when you hit the Mexican border It stops and you'd have to go another 4,000 miles to Argentina to get to Mercado Libre And yet these individuals Find time to be critical of our leadership in the United States. So I think just generally taking pause and just realize how wonderful and prosperous America is, that America is the worst country in the world except for all the rest, if that's what you need to believe. So I think there needs to just be a renewed sense of appreciation for our government. And then when I first wrote the four about big tech, it started out as a love letter and

turned into a cautionary tale the more I learned about these companies. This was the opposite experience. I'm a glass half empty kind of guy. I know the problems. I can write about them. But what I found is as you look at any one of these problems, teen depression at the hands of social media, polarization because of our media and raging us, income inequality because of a regressive tax structure, whatever it might be, these are all, these are all problems of our own making and they can absolutely be unmade.

And that is in summary and there's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed with what's right with it. The incumbents and the people who have benefited from income inequality will have us believe that the bigger factors of play and these are intractable, unfixable problems. We have faced your veteran. There's a photojournalist. I think her name is Maria Amalo, who's been colorizing World War II photos. And she has this amazing colorized photo showing a landing craft coming up on Omaha Beach and the front gate has just been dropped into the water. 16 GI's, average age 26, average monthly salary, $800 on a Fleshing Justice basis, waiting through the water, thinking about what waited for them on the beach.

Two or three of those men would not make it off the beach. And I imagine them turning around and just as we can go back in history through photographs, some sort of suspension of the space time continuum and they can see us. And they see our problems, income inequality, teen depression, polarization and media. And I imagine they would look at us and say, look what I'm facing. You can't fix that. facing. You can't fix that. You're safe. You have massive productivity. You have technology that's incredible. You can cure diseases. And you can deal with that. Look at what what waits for me on the beach. So I came out of this really hopeful that there is we face down much bigger problems in the ones we face now. It's just more a matter of will, if you will. Okay, well, Scott, it was truly an honor

to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for joining us. And I highly encourage the listeners to pick up a copy of your book, I'll have it in the show notes. John, thanks so much for your time and your good work. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Scott Galloway. And I wanted to thank Scott and

Penguin Random House for the honor and privilege of having him on the show. Links to all things Scott will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show. It helps support the show and makes it free for our listeners. Videos are on YouTube at John Armiles, where I now have over 16,000 subscribers and over 400 videos. Please go, subscribe, check it out. Avertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com.

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It's like, you died by suicide, right? It's a story where the end of the story sort of takes priority over everything that came before that. And I think when we talk about people who've died by suicide, again, that becomes like the lead, that becomes the headline. And so if you know someone who has lost someone that they love in this way, like,

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