Plain English with Derek Thompson - Scott Galloway on Why the Internet Is a Mess, Why the News Is So Angry, and Why American Men Are ‘Adrift’

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

A wide-ranging conversation with speaker and star podcaster Scott Galloway ('The Prof G Pod,' 'Pivot') on his new book 'Adrift,' why being a pundit means being a talented “catastrophist,” the struggles of broke and lonely men, the upside of crypto, and the dark side of the metaverse. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Scott Galloway Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Yossi Salick, and I'm the host of Bansplain, a show where we explain cult bands and iconic artists by going deep into their histories and discographies. We're back with a brand new season at our brand new home, the Ringer podcast network, tackling a whole new batch of artists, from grunge gods to power pop pioneers to new metal legends and many, many more. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, only on Spotify. Today's guest is Scott Galloway. Scott is the host of several extremely popular podcasts about tech and business like Pivot, Prof G-Pod. He's a big maher in the world of tech and media. He can also be pretty controversial.

He picks fights with Facebook and Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. And he has a new book out this week called Adrift, which is a chart-filled tour of politics, business, tech, and culture. I think it's fair to say that some of the episodes that we do on this show, many of the episodes that we do on this show, are very focused. I think of them like an espresso shot of news analysis, like trying to seek to explain something very concentrated and specific, whether it's the Ukraine counterstrike or the psychology of self-talk. But I also want this show to occasionally have room for the very opposite, for wide-ranging conversations with people that I admire about stuff that isn't necessarily in the news that week. It's about bringing on a big brain to tell me about what they're about.

obsessed with. And what's got me obsessed, and we can share our obsessions and unlock a few ideas about the world and how it works. This episode definitely fits into that latter category. Scott and I cover a lot in the next hour. We talk about tech addiction and internet regulation. We talk about what it takes to be a good pundit today and why decent people in the take-slinging business should feel a little bit guilty about their relationship to catastrophe and anger, given that catastrophizing the news with a tremendous amount of anger is a very reliable way to get and hold people's attention, but it's not necessarily a very reliable way to be a good person. We pick up on a theme that I covered last week with Richard Reeves on the state of men in America. We talk about the future

of education and why it's so hard to disrupt college with virtual or online education. And we close with a little rapid fire on crypto and the metaverse. If you have questions, comments, ideas for future episodes, keep emailing us at plain English at Spotify.com. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Scott Galloway, welcome to the podcast. Derek, it is always good to see you. Yours is the only podcast I'll do except for the dozens and dozens of others who just asked, but I was most excited about this one. So your new book Adrift is a chart-filled statistical guide to the state of America in the world. And it spans, economics and tech and politics and culture. I'd really like to start with online culture.

I thought I was beyond the capacity to be shocked by phone news statistics, but you managed to shock me. You have a stat in here that says the average Gen Z American unlocks her smartphone 79 times per day. That means approximately one unlock every 10, 11, 12 minutes of waking life. A 2020 study that you referenced found that 96% of Gen Z Americans will not go to the bathroom without their phone. I know that you follow Jonathan Heights' work on teen anxiety and smartphone use. What is the crux of your concern here? So a couple things, a couple dozen things.

I think that at a very basic level that putting phones in the hands of teens 24 by 7 is to sort of put them their full selves in their face, 24. four by seven because they're tempted to say things, post pictures of themselves, and they're sort of in the high school cafeteria 24 by seven. And you're younger than me, but when I used to come home from school, I watch cartoons that didn't interact back with me. I saw my mom. She did not know what happened at school. She loved me regardless of what I said or did or what I wore, and I just got a bit of a break from it. And now I think what happens is a lot of kids retreat to their room and start posting on Instagram and getting feedback. And I think with teens, especially

teen girls, boys bully physically and verbally, and you've written about this, girls bully relationally. So I think there's a lot. I think we've taken bullying and abuse and addiction to kind of new heights. Also, the male brain, the prefrontal cortex doesn't develop as quickly for girls, 85% of gambling addicts or men. And when they can start trading crypto or stocks on And there's kind of these dark psychological techniques to get them addicted. I think it's much more easy to get addicted to certain types of feedback, affirmation, gambling-like behavior. So I worry that our youth is growing up depressed.

And you mentioned Professor Haidt. He's done a lot of work showing that since social went on mobile, I'm kind of parroting back a lot of your stuff, has exploded. hospital admissions. And I also worry that it's making our discourse more coarse and a younger generation is growing up not feeling good about America. I think the kind of content that they're drawn to

and the algorithms like are more likely to talk about income inequality as opposed to the great success stories of our immigrants. And there's a kernel of truth and everything, but I worry that we're kind of eating ourselves from the inside out. So income inequality, teen depression, unearned lack of patriotism.

These are all things. And then, and last thing, and I'll stop talking, but this is a point in life where people start establishing relationships and young adults start mating. And if you look at what's happened with online dating, whenever technology comes into a sector, it consolidates it. So it consolidated retail, social, and search with Amazon, meta, and Google, we're consolidating dating.

And that is now the majority of people who establish relationships establish them online. And because everybody has access to everybody, you have Porsche polygamy, and that is 10% of the males get about 90% of the attention. So if you have 50 men on Tinder, 50 women, 46 of the men will show all of their attention to just four men, leaving 46 men vying for four women. This means that the top 10% of men have too many opportunities, which doesn't lead to good behavior. the bottom kind of the top 50 to 90 percent get a date maybe, and the bottom 50 percent of men are just shut out of the mating market. And we're producing too many of these very broke and alone men who aren't attaching to work, aren't attaching to school, aren't attaching to a job.

You know, I say Salman Rosty's attack wasn't as much about the fatwa as it was about a young man living in his mother's basement. So all of these things worry about the phone. I think it's got a tremendous upsides. just as pesticides and even opioids have upsides, but I worry we're not regulating or thinking thoughtfully about the downsides. That was a word, Sally.

I asked a big question, you gave a big answer, only appropriate. I imagine that some people are going to think, well, there has to be inequality in terms of men's attention to women as well. Is it your understanding that the inequality is actually more weighted toward female to male interest?

I actually did not know that. So the genie coefficient, which measures variance, if mating were an economy, the online mating economy is more unequal than the economy in Venezuela in terms of income inequality. And that is, because it's very too demanding, when you meet somebody, there's vibe, there's humor, the ceremonies, there's just a lot of different things that go into, there's persistence, there's just a lot of things that go into why people decide to be attracted to each other to fall in love and to mate. And online, it's much less rudimentary.

And specifically, it's mostly for men, their ability to signal resources or ability to garner resources. So if you're at MIT and just got a job with KKR and you live in a wealthy zip code and you flash accidentally your profile shows your Rolex, you're going to get a lot of swipe rights. And women are much choosier than men. A guy will see a profile and think, oh, she looks nice or she looks attractive and swipe. right. Women are much more selective because instinctively they have to be because the downsides of pregnancy are much greater. So they have a much finer filter. So the result is just this massive inequality where, again, a disproportionate amount of interest is flowing to the top 10 percent, which you end up with is Porsche polygamy and the most unstable violent societies in the world

have this one thing in common. And that is they have a small group of men that garnered the majority to the mating opportunities. And there's an African proverb that if the young man doesn't feel the warmth of the tribe, he'll burn it down to make his own warmth. And I worry that we're producing too many kind of societal arsonists, if you will. On the issue of online dating, I will admit,

I don't know that I've revealed this on the show. I met my wife on Bumble. And not only did I meet my wife on Bumble, she initially swiped left on me. Bumble, however, several months earlier had introduced a function that allowed women to shake their phone and the app would recognize the shaking of the phone

and once or twice a day allow the woman who is flipping through the male faces to get back the face that she had just rejected. So she had rejected me very, very quickly, and then shook the phone, got me back, and it is literally only because Bumble introduced that feature into their app several months before she saw my face on her phone

that I married my wife. It's just, you know, you don't want to take yourself too far down that existential, Avenue where you realize just how contingent life is. If only I'd been there on that day, if I had taken a different taxi, my life would have been totally different. But this definitely gets me down that street. I'd love to know what you think we should do about this. There is a, I think a growing sense that it is okay to use the word addiction, or at least compulsion here. Matthew Genskow and others at Stanford have shown that when we pay people to not use social media,

they self-report less anxiety and more happiness. In just this August, there was a new paper by the surnames are Avery Juntaella and Jiao called Why Don't We Sleep Enough, if listeners want to Google it, it's called Why Don't We Sleep Enough? They paid college students to set consistent sleeping schedules, and they found that students did not reduce social time, but they did reduce social media screen time by 40 minutes a day. When you're paid to do something, you don't do it, and you are aligning your sort of hoped for, persona with your revealed behavior. This to me describes a compulsion. People know this is bad for them, and they're looking for some intervention to help them stop using it. So it tells me that there is some form of addictive behavior here, and we have a model of regulating certain addictive behaviors,

whether it's cigarettes or drug use. I wonder if you think we need to go that far when it comes to social media and smartphone use. So what do we have here? We have, I mean, you talk about Gen Z unlocking their phone 80 times a day, and I think it's like 20 or 30 for boomers. I mean, I don't know about you, but if I'm in a cab, just instinctively, not expecting a message, not looking random specific news, just look down and open my phone. And it reminds me when my father would just be sitting, you know, sitting on the couch doing nothing, and would just instinctively light up a cigarette. I don't even think he thought about it. It's just like, okay, I'm doing nothing. Any moment, any moment of silence.

It's any moment of peace I have, any moment of contemplation, I'm going to light a cigarette, and now it's I'm going to open my phone. I think that in terms of regulation, regulation is a pretty crude hammer. I think the first thing starts with just education. I think educating young men about the fact that 80 to 95 percent, and most of the legitimate studies put it close to 95 percent of people who day trade lose money. And Robin Hood's tagline should be the more you trade, the more you lose. The best performing investors right now are a class of people known as dead people,

and that is when people die and their accounts go into an escrow, and there's no one trading or has the authority to trade their stocks. They outperform most traders. So educating people about the dangers of day trading, educating people about the importance of putting their phone out of arms reach when they're sleeping. Parents being, I can't modulate when my kids are on, on when they're on their phones, but I can modulate how much time they're on their phone. I think we all need to, and also carving out portions of Section 230, where if there is a direct link

between your app and Teen Depression that a class action suit can be filed against you, if this podcast, if there was tangible evidence that this podcast was resulting in teen girls and self-harm, we would get sued or your program would get sued. And I think that's a good thing. And I think it makes you more thoughtful about some of the externalities. So I think there's regulation. I think there's liability. I think there's education. I think parents need to be thoughtful about what it means to be a good parent and involved in their kids' behavior.

But I think there's a lot that can be done. And one of the things I don't like about coming out of the big tech narrative is what I call the delusion of complexity. And generally speaking, the narrative goes something like this. These are complex problems. Teen Depression has a variety of inputs. And, you know, our platform just represents larger society, some good, some bad. And I find that just extraordinary bullshit. When Amazon started getting critic bombed for the Lord of the Rings or for Sheihulk, attorney at law, they found that people were lying.

People, someone got angry and bad actors showed up and started giving them bad reviews. They took, they closed it down. They used AI. They used commenting software. And they cleaned it up and they posted back up in 48 hours. and they got a much cleaner, more civil, more accurate read. But yet, Google and Facebook just can't figure it out. They just can't.

One account gets kicked off a Twitter, and somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of election misinformation has gone the next day. So it's this ruse of complexity that we've all sort of, in the media and academia, kind of bought into, that these are difficult problems. I actually think a lot of this, not all of it, but a lot of it can be solved.

And teen depression is complex, but the two primary drivers that I've seen from work are one concierge parenting or bulldozer parenting where we, you know, use so many sanitary wipes on our kids' lives. They don't develop their own immunities. And also social media. There's just, you look at the line. And all these people who have not taken statistics will hear this program and say, correlation does not equal causation.

Well, actually, when you eliminate every other cause, correlation does equal cause. and we have that here. Social media going on mobile is a huge source of teen depression. I agree with so much of what you just said. I am nervous about the blunt tool of regulation, as you called it. One reason why maybe I'm more pessimistic about regulation to help to clean up the social media and lies that cross social media is that I think that, you know, there are something things that people say that are clearly outright lies. And there's some things that people say that are clearly just disgusting propaganda. But there is so much that is sometimes considered false or considered propaganda that turns out to be true. And disentangling those two categories

is really, really difficult work. I saw this throughout the pandemic. In the first weeks of the pandemic, you had public health officials like Fauci talk about masks as if they weren't particularly useful, and then we later learned that they were. And then we later learned that only some of the masks sometimes worn well were useful for blocking transmission. You take an issue like the vaccines, which initially were fantastic against blocking both transmission and severe illness, but then because of the variance, they became efficient at only blocking severe illness and their effectiveness against transmission clearly went down. You had a lot of confusion throughout the pandemic about, does this thing spread from services or not? And an organization requires, requires.

The CDC is an organization that was required by virtue of its establishment within the public health hierarchy to distinguish fact from truth. And they often struggled to do it. And this tells me that it's just going to be really, really difficult to have a body that scrubs the Internet for truth and doesn't, from time to time get things pretty famously and catastrophically wrong. Does that concern you? I 100% agree with you. I don't know who we would or what we would appoint to try and be the arbiter of truth. A couple of years ago or 18 months ago, someone suggested on Twitter that the virus originated in a Chinese lab. And they were immediately attacked as jingoistic, you know, jingoistic and xenophobic.

And we all just kind of like went after them, right? And it ended up that that might in fact be a plausible explanation. I've changed my mind on that seven times. I mean, that alone is a great example. Yeah. But here's the thing. Someone should be allowed to go on Twitter in the public square, and I believe they should be allowed to say that.

I think people should be allowed to espouse conspiracy theories. What I have a problem with is bad actors creating thousands of fake accounts to promote theories or undermine people's credibility to serve their own financial interests or to diminish or intimidate critics of Putin. And I believe that happens. I think identity would clear up a lot of this problem. LinkedIn doesn't have nearly the amount of just total vile bullshit that Twitter and Meta have because they enforce identity or mostly enforce it. I think we should be age-gating certain social media.

I'm just not sure any 13-year-old girl needs to be on Instagram. Instagram starts from a place of perversion. The algorithms encourage girls, women under the age of females under the age of 18, to post pictures in very provocative, you know, position. in revealing clothing, and then be evaluated by their peer group and strange men all around the world. That just, I mean, parents just shouldn't be down with that. I'm not sure why any 13-year-old needs to be on social media. I'm not sure why social media shouldn't be verifying identity and having some age-gating.

But I agree with you. People deciding what is or is not true or false or rumor. I think some of the really crazy shit they can do away with, but also, So certain libel laws, when Fox reports, when they knew the voting machines from Dominion were not being weaponized by Venezuela, and they reported on this conspiracy theory and legitimized it. And there was evidence showing they knew it was false, but they put it out there anyways. And it cost Dominion a lot of economic harm. They were sued for liable. And then the next day, you saw every anchor on Fox say, we were wrong.

There's no evidence that Dominion had voting machines weaponized. That shit still circulates on social media. They have no such obligation. So I think there's a lot of sunlight in between trying to find people who are the arbiters of truth and just enforcing basic identity, basic libel laws when these organizations or people know what they're saying is false, and also age gating. Another issue at the intersection of technology and news is this idea of what kind of stories tend to go viral. And I'm so interested in this, just the way that our emotions create a particular emotional ecosystem online. You have a great graph of one of my all-time favorite studies, the 2012 study by Jonah Berger at Wharton on what makes online content go viral. And for those who are familiar with my going on and on about this, they studied which New York Times articles were the most likely to make the paper.

most emailed list, and they identified that the emotional qualities of those articles that are most likely to ensure virality were anxiety, awe, and more than anything else, anger, that articles that inspired anger were the most likely to be shared. And when I think about this study, I always feel a little bit guilty, because if I'm really honest with myself, truly, truly honest, I know that when I'm trying to sell a take or a headline, I can always default to anxiety or anger to sell it. And so I feel this pundits temptation to use the power of anger to my own advantage. I wonder, do you also feel that way about the power of anger in media? Do you have this complicated frenemy relationship with this quality? Yeah, and I don't have moral clarity around

this because part of the reasons I'm successful, part of the reason I'm economically secure is I've channeled my anger into my media and people respond to it. I shit post a lot. I've attack people personally. I do have a code around attacking people personally. I only do it with people who are much more powerful than me when I think the data subjects them to scrutiny. But I recognize my anger has served me well professionally online, and I'm trying to modulate it and be more cognizant of it. And you're right about the media. I mean, if it bleeds a lead, 65 of the last 68 days, gas prices have gone down. That's caused one headline. On their way up, the four months where they were skyrocketing,

there was 21 New York Times headlines on increasing gas prices. What I think is interesting, if you were to expand, if you were to say, right, media can only pick one headline for the last hundred years in the West, that headline would probably be America and Europe,

turn back fascism, with incredible heroism, the brains, the bronze, and the blood of the British, the Americans, and the Russians turn back fascism. If you were to say, you can pick one headline for the last 50 years.

It would probably be something along the lines of unexpected, unfathomable global prosperity. If we're only allowed one newspaper to sum up the last 50 years, that would be the headline. But that doesn't look at, you know, in CNN, we have the Situation Room. And you're right, all the data shows that we're like Tyrannosaurus Rexes. We're drawn towards movement and violence. And so we have to modulate ourselves. And I'm trying to do this. Yesterday I had a wonderful flight on JetBlue.

And so I got the names of the – I'm purchasing it right now. I got the names of the flight attendants. And I tweeted out the flight number and how outstanding and on time and wonderful the flight was. And I got like – I got like, you know, that same affirmation horror as anybody else. I got like 600 likes because we're so – and this is the guy I am. I'm the guy that's much more likely to talk about my room service being late or, you know, to take to Twitter as a weapon of retribution when I don't get the treatment as a consumer that I believe I deserve. But I think we just have to modulate that behavior. And I have a chapter in the book on the progress we've made.

It just is to not acknowledge America's role in the prosperity and freedoms, we have more democracies and autocracies. The World Health Organization in 1980 set a goal of cutting global poverty in half in 40 years. They cut it in half in 20 years. They cut it in half in 20 years. and then we cut it in half again. We have eliminated diseases. We talk about inequality in the U.S., but if you pan out and look at the earth, we've actually had this unbelievable global equalization take place.

People are spending more time than in history, donating time and money to people they will never meet. We have people all over the world planting trees, the shade of which they will never sit under. There's tremendous. And America, I believe, America has led that March, 50% of all global philanthropy starts with U.S. institutions. So, but that shit just doesn't make headlines because it's not that interesting.

So you have to, I think, and I do this at the beginning of the book, acknowledge the progress we've made it as a species, and specifically the role America has played in it. Yeah, but the media, it doesn't sell papers. That stuff doesn't get you to tune in, right? You've outlined the problem so well. I just read a study that had a really interesting point. They said the reason that anger seems to go viral more than kindness is that kindness can spread to the edge of a social network, but anger can spread beyond it.

Anger is like a universal language in a way that kindness is not. So for example, your tweet is a perfect example. Scott Galloway had a great flying experience. It's interesting information to people who know who Scott is. But it's not very interesting to, it's not interesting information to anyone who doesn't know who you are. If you have an amazing story of, I mean, I just literally saw a tweet today of the fact that like a bulldog on a plane like had diarrhea and ran up and down the aisle of the plane. Fire hose. I bet that.

Yeah, fire hose pug. That story is funny to anybody. No one needs to know who tweeted that in order for it to be funny. And so this anger and awe can go viral outside of social networks in a way that kindness does not. And I try to think about ways of folding this into my journalism. And I try to, in a way, maybe one way to think of it is like a Trojan horse of anger. You arrive at a problem with anger. You sell it with catastrophe.

You say, you know, America is suffering the fastest declining life expectancy of any country in the OECD. This is fucking terrible. We have to solve it. But then, once you get people through that door of anger and catastrophizing, you open up the Trojan horse and what's inside. Oh, here's some solutions. Here's some ways that we can think about lowering life expectancy. Here's a diatribe on how we make medical education a little bit too expensive and long. And so I mean, I'm sort of giving.

up the playbook right here in terms of a lot of my work, but like, I think that sometimes using anger to get people in the door, and it's like, ah, now you're here. And I can tell you what's useful and what's true and what's not necessarily just designed to make you feel like shit. I don't know if you ever think about your own work that way, of catastrophizing up front in order to bring people in on the back. Absolutely. And if you want to be really successful in media, you have to be an outstanding catastrophist. Catastrophicist. I mean, that is the core competence. You've got to, to be able to take data and take it to a very ugly place to capture people's attention. And I do that a lot. But what I'm trying to do is to say, okay, here's some proposed solutions,

and here's the silver lining. I have now in every presentation I do, I do about 80 presentations a year. It's kind of how I make my living, is I do an entire section. I force myself to do silver linings because I'm naturally a pessimist. I struggle with anger. And it's been very economically advantageous to me. But at the end of the day, I'm not sure how much it's, helping society. I just think of it as like the fifth grade. You know, occasionally someone did something kind. There was a lot of kindness. Kids aren't kind, but some are. But the thing that got us all interested was a resource if someone started having words and then we surrounded them and started screaming, fight, fight, fight, fight. That just summarizes our entire media industrial complex.

Like, fight, fight, I got, you know, and a lot of it is starts with the man or the woman in the mirror. I think we all have an obligation to try and take the temperature down a little bit because it was, and I talk about this in the book, 54% of Democrats are worried about their kids marrying a Republican. A third of each party thinks the people in the other party are their mortal enemy. And I like to think I'm a student of World War II history. There's this great colorization of all these World War II photos by this wonderful New York Times photojournalists. I forget her name. Anyways, and there's one of these guys on Omaha Beach waiting into the water.

The average age was 26. They were paid on an inflation-adjusted basis, $800. And I imagine them flipping around and looking at us and going, oh, you like social media and income in a quality. Like, oh, those are your biggest problems? Check what I'm fucking facing here. And you can't solve that. You can't be a little nice through each other. And I imagine, I can't imagine any of these young men had any idea what political party, the guys on the left and right.

They just knew the two or three of the three of them. We're going to get off that beach alive. And so I'm now a believer, and it's easy for me to say that I've aged out in social service. I think we need more connective tissue to realize we're Americans first before Republicans' Democrats. And also, we need to acknowledge Americans' best allies will always be other Americans. And we've lost that. So I think, you know, the way we are being atomized, we're actually, we're actually. geopolitically, probably as strong as we've ever been. We're food independent. We're energy

independent. Regardless to the rise of China, we still have the most valuable companies in the world. We make the best vaccines. No one's lining up for the Chinese of the Russian vaccines right now. Most important product of the last 50 years, wasn't a fucking phone. It was a vaccine. And we make the best ones, and we made them the fastest, and we had the best distribution. We still, we are the best position nation globally, economically, philosophically, spiritually. and yet we're going after each other. So we're eating each other from the inside out. So I'm trying to figure out ways where I've stopped shitposting government.

I try to highlight the FCC commissioner waiting on one of my tweet threats today talking about what they're trying to do. And I'm immediately like, thank you for your service, an American flag, right? I realize these people are good people doing their level best. And everyone is so critical of them. Anyways, big speech. In the interest of being catastrophes that offer solutions, I want to talk about the state of men in America for a bit. Your book has some really interesting statistics, some alarming statistics too.

So men's share of college enrollment has declined to 40 percent. That is an all-time low. Men in America are nine times more likely than women to go to jail. Ninety-two percent of mass shooters in America are male, and 68 percent of those are under the age of 35. And you write, quote, more men getting off the ladder to prosperity means more men getting on the path to becoming what I consider the most dangerous cohort in America, broke and lonely males. I want to talk about a few ways to take that piece of terrible news, of anger-inspiring, catastrophic news, and think about some ways that we can change a situation. And you emphasize, I love this, more paths to the upper middle class.

And you lay out a couple different ways that we could do that by reforming college and reforming some areas around education. So let's go through a few. One idea that you propose is that we should essentially bribe colleges to expand their freshman seats by threatening to tax their endowments. Tell me a little bit about this idea and how you think it could help the situation with young men in America. So first off, you're right, college enrollment has gone from 60-40 male to female to 40-60, but it's actually worse than that. When you talk about college graduates, it's two to one female to males because men drop out at a greater rates. When you're walking down the avenue that is America, for every one male college grad, you're going to see two female college grads. And this has a knock-on effect, and that is women made socioeconomically horizontally and up, men horizontally and down.

So when there are no educated men out there, women aren't going to mate with them. So we're going to have lower household for formation of decline in birth rates, which kills an economy. me. So it's actually, you know, kind of worse than we think. So my idea around education is what I call a grand bargain and a reformatting of education. And that is the reason I'm here with you, it's so easy to credit your grit and your character for your success and blame the mark of your failures. The reason I'm here with you, the reason I'm economically secure, the reason it's easy for me to be a loving father and a good partner and I'd like to think a good citizen is because the generosity and grace and wisdom of California taxpayers and the Regents of the University of California.

When I applied to UCLA, you were talking about shaking your phone and your wife getting another, you getting another kind of crack at it. When I applied to UCLA, the admissions rate was 76%. And I had to apply twice. The admissions rate this year will be 6%. So without a degree at UCLA, I wouldn't have got a job at Morgan Stanley. I wouldn't gotten into the MBA school at Haas. I wouldn't have started analytics companies, I wouldn't have hired and fired 1,400 people, and I wouldn't have paid $30 million in taxes over the last 20 years. It's paid off for all of us. But now we've decided that we're going to only hire education is only for two cohorts, and that is the children are rich people who are 77 times more likely to get into an elite university than the bottom 99%

or the freakishly remarkable. And I can prove to all of us, 99% of our children will not be freakishly remarkable. They will not be in the top 1%. So, I'm not a fan of the federal student debt forgiveness. I think it should have been targeted around people who go into social service or underpaid fields. With three or 400 billion of the $600 to a trillion that's going to cost, you could have gone to our great public universities that teach two-thirds of our kids and said, okay, this is the deal. You're going to expand enrollments by 6% a year over the next 10 years,

and you're going to double enrollments. You're going to double freshman seats. UCLA is going to go from 6,000 to 12,000, Cal State Northridge University, of North Carolina Chapel Hill, double the enrollments. You're also going to lower cost 2% a year. And we're going to pay for the infrastructure and technology to get you there. And we're going to hold you to a certain level of efficiency, which there is a lot of efficiency to be reeked out of these universities using technology. And where did that get us? In 10 years, you're going to have double the enrollments at an inflation-adjusted basis, half the cost. College isn't for everybody,

because in the third thing we want in exchange for this massive investment, in addition to broader admissions and lower costs is we want a massive investment in non-traditional, non-four-year training, a two-year program in cybersecurity, a one-year program in specialty construction of nuclear power plants, an 18-month program and certification in health tech. There are so many main street jobs that pay well that people don't know how to get into it. 50% of Germans have some sort of vocational certification. It's 5% in the U.S. And that's an investment, not only in America, but it's especially an investment in young men who don't have the skills, don't have the discipline, don't have the attributes that call it that schools are looking for. There are some schools in NYU, Derek, that if they were totally application blind, they'd not only be 60 or 70 percent female, they'd be 60 or 70 percent Asian female.

And good for them. They're successful. They have figured out the attributes that colleges want. when seven and ten high school valedictorians are girls, when boys are twice as likely to be suspended, even when adjusted for behavior, because schools are run by women who see themselves and young girls. And when a boy and a girl are brought into the principal's office for cheating, the boy is twice as likely to be suspended. And once someone is suspended, and with black boys, it's three to five times. And once a boy is suspended two to three times, he's not longer going to college. So I think a massive increase in freshman seats, a halting to the fetishization of this four-year liberal arts degrees, recognizing some people don't have the money, they don't have the time, they don't have the inclination, they just want to learn, how can I make 120 grand a year installing energy-efficient H-FAC? I want to serve my people. I want to, you know, there's probably working with our

great armed services company a chance to have a two-year training in certain types of jobs in the military. They turn them into officers such that they don't have to go for four years. So I think it's expansion of our college enrollments, decrease in costs, and also just a massive leveling up around vocational programs. Because if you started affirmative action for men, it probably becomes so politicized, it doesn't work and it enrages people. I think what we need more broadly is to recognize that in the last 40 years, as a percentage of GDP, the wealth controlled by people under the age of 40 has gone from 19 percent to 9. We need to make a massive investment on our young people. We've just kind of soaked them. The two biggest tax deductions are mortgage interests and capital gains,

who owns homes and stocks, old people, who rents and makes all their money from salaries, young people. So my approach to helping men, if you will, is to just level up all young people. And I think that will disproportionately help young men. And then you'll see more mating taking place because we need more economically and emotionally viable young men. You said so much that I want to follow up on, but I also want to make sure we get to tech. I guess I'll just restrict it to a comment and a question.

The comment is that it's really difficult, I think, to talk about these issues. And I think these issues should be talked about, to be clear. But I think it's difficult to talk about them sometimes without being accused of being a men's right activist. Oh, you think? You think? You've tried it a lot more than I have.

Without being called Andrew Tate with a college degree, that's what I've been getting called on the, anyways. I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, one of the reasons I think is that, and this sounds a little bit, statistical, but there's more variation among male outcomes. Men are more likely to become billionaires. They're also more likely to become mass shooters. They're more likely to earn $200,000. They're more likely to fail out of college. And there's more variation, which means that for every mass

shooter that you point to and say, we have a crisis of broken, lonely men, someone else can point to a man they think is lonely, but is a billionaire. And that variation sometimes serves to confuse us. But that variation is, I think, really important just to state as a fact. The question that I wanted to put to you on education is that we've just come out of a two-year period where we saw the benefits of virtual work for lots of people and virtually working out for lots of people. Remote work went up like crazy and Peloton went up like crazy. It also came down like crazy in terms of stocks, but as a social phenomenon, it's still a big, damn thing. Why do you it's been so difficult for online education to have its post-pandemic moment.

So I got this wrong. I started an online education firm, and it struggled. We came out of the gates, just gangbusters because people were stuck in their homes and thought, okay, I'll take a class. And, I mean, we were doing classes with 1,400 people spending a thousand bucks a pop with MPSs of 68. They were happy. They thought they were good. They thought, I'm getting a decent, you know, proximity or decent facsimile of a class that would cost 7,000 at MIT or NYU Stern for a thousand. And then six months ago, it all just fell off a cliff because the last thing people want to do is be in their homes, learning and staring and staring at a screen. Online ed has not had its moment. Coursera to you, all these online education companies have crashed. And I'm not entirely sure why. I think that there's still,

one, less people are going to college. Two, people now want to be out, and the ones who are really qualified want that certification that comes from what are the strongest brands in the world, and that is universities. But online ed just hasn't had its moment. We keep waiting for it to happen, the way it's happened in retail and media. You know, at some point, the online, you know, the digitization of these industries has happened. It just hasn't happened in online ed. I'm curious what you think, because I can't figure this out. I've gotten it wrong. I don't know. My best bet is it has something to do with the sheepskin effect and accreditation. The sheepskin effect just being that, you know, going to Harvard doesn't just mean you get a

Harvard education. It means you get a diploma that says I graduated from Harvard University. I think it's, it takes time for those sort of status games to be won by startups. In fact, what was the last great American university? Is it Stanford, which was founded, what, 100 years ago, 110 years ago? It's been a long-ass time since a great American university was started. Arizona State, to a certain extent, is doing lots of work in terms of bringing people, I'm sure, into the middle and upper-middle class, but a truly great elite American university. It's been a long time because status is so hard won, and it's hard for status to be made abundant. So by definition, the more competition you have, the harder it is to introduce a new competitor.

That's number one. And I think number two, what did I say? Accreditation. I think that there are lots of jobs in America, like, say, teachers, for example, where there's a piece of paper that you need in order to be particularly competitive in these positions. My wife is a grad student in clinical psychology. There is a long process to be able to be a therapist. And to a certain extent, you know, you want to say, of course there should be.

These people have people's lives in their hands. But we do make it pretty difficult to get into certain occupations. And as long as there's this accreditation barrier in front of online education, a lot of people reasonably aren't going to see online education as a reasonable substitute for a public-for-year university. You tapped into something powerful, and that is a recognition that at universities, we don't educate, we certify. And that is the hardest thing about getting a degree from Stanford is getting in. Almost everybody can graduate. And it's not like the Navy SEAL. were... I think we educate and we certify. I do think that Stanford and Harvard educate,

but the certification signal, I think, is so powerful that it makes it really difficult to figure out, wait, exactly how much smarter is a Stanford compsci grad than a mid-tier public university compsci grad. I think it's hard sometimes to see what the knowledge advantage is because the network effect is so large. You graduate from Stanford compsci, you walk down the street into a VC's office. graduate comps eye at, you know, Stony Brook University or something, or, you know, a public school in New York, I don't think you have the same network and sheepskin advantages. So I think it's very difficult just to know what our college is doing. What are they actually, what, what human capital are they actually giving graduates? I think it's actually, I think it's a really, really hard

question to figure out. Maybe that's one reason why it's hard to disrupt. But you talk about Stanford, 40 or 15 miles or 60 miles is Cal Poly, San Luis, Obispo. I don't think the education between the two schools is that markedly different. I think they both have outstanding faculties and have to do an outstanding job of educating. There's just no comparison. If you want to be a venture capitalists, you walk in with a Stanford degree, you're just, your on-ramp is, you know, the width of the Mississippi. And at Cal State, Polly, San Luis, Abispo, you better know somebody and they better really like you or you're not even getting an interview at Andreessen Horowitz. So I think the certification around these brands, and these brands are the most powerful

brands in the world. Now, what you talked about is accreditation, and that is, in order to be eligible to borrow money, you have to be accredited. And who runs the accreditation institutions, the incumbents? So the number of new universities has grown at 0.4% over the last 40 years. And we have a very dangerous gestalt in American society, and it's a rejectionist, sort of nimbious culture, and that is once I have a college degree, once I have a home, once I've established tech dominance with a company, the strategy is to make it harder for other people to get a degree,

make it harder for other people to build housing, which will drive the prices of my home that I own up, and make it harder for any new entrance into the sector. And it's total bullshit. And how many times of all of us said, I would never get into the college I applied to it. And I kind of say it with pride because that means that degree from MIT is just for so much more now. Well, that means your daughter's not getting in boss, or maybe the daughter of a Stanford grad will get in because he or she's likely rich. But we, you know, America, in my view, especially higher ed is the tip of the spear. Any major movement or philosophy or thinking or new or weapon or movement starts usually on university campus. So that's the tip of spear of America. And it used to be, college is about let's

find unremarkable kids and give me a remarkable shot. I got into Berkeley graduate school with a 2.27 undergraduate GPA because they're like, you know, you're not qualified, but you're native son of California. We're going to help you. That's what education America is supposed to be. How do we give a real shot to as many people as possible? And where it's morphed to is how do we identify the top 1% and turn them into billionaires? And here's the problem. Even if you buy into that, which I wouldn't, But even if you buy into that, there's no way to predict greatness based on a bloodline or anything you can measure at the age of 18. I didn't have my shit together at 18.

I mean, you did. My sense is you got out of the gates really fast. It was a fucking idiot at 18. I mean, it was an idiot. I knew how to make bongs out of household items, and that's about it. That was my major talent. But this great University of California said, not only are going to make a great education accessible, we're going to make it affordable.

And now it's not. Now, unless you have a patent captain the lacrosse team and build wells in Africa, you're not getting in. And you get arbitrage down to this joy bag of donuts university because your parents have believed they failed as parents unless they get their kid into college. And because of this cartel, which is much more powerful and much more corrupt than OPEC, in my view, we all raise prices in lockstep. A bunch of youth end up signing up for up for this predatory loans to go to a second-tier school. they pay a Mercedes price for a Hyundai product, and we end up with a bunch of indebted young people who can't get married, can't form households, can't buy a house, can't start a business, all because me and my colleagues wake up every morning and ask ourselves one question.

How do we pay ourselves more and reduce our accountability? And we found the ultimate, ultimate strategy, and that's the LVMH, Hermes-Chinell strategy, constrict supply artificially such that the people who have that degree and the people who got on the faculty, have an easier time raising money and paying themselves more by starting bullshit departments where there's no accountability. That was a rant.

That was a rant. That was a hell of a rant. I have to ask you a tech question. Metaverse, crypto, what do you think is more bullshit? Look, it requires some nuance. You've looked at this. Like, okay, let's start with Web 3.

There's crypto, there's NFTs, and there's, you know, DALs, decentralized autonomous organization. I love the concept of the Dow. They haven't taken off, but I love the idea of bringing a bunch of people together with a sole purpose mission to either buy an asset or go into a company. I think when the gas fees come down, I think it's a really, it's like an SPV that is more egalitarian, right, a special purpose vehicle. I think it's a neat idea. I don't know if it's going to change the world.

NFTs, I'm actually quite bullish on NFTs because I see my kids buying skins on Fortnite. I don't, I think a younger generation has an easier time assigning value to a virtual good. And if you can create scarcity around 400 prints of an artist and break the mold and say there's only 400 versus one, I don't see any reason why you can't translate that to digital. And because we're increasingly finding mates online, being able to signal your worth as a mate by having the Chanel logo from an NFT and you're one of 1,000 people that has the Chanel. or it's tokenized. I think there's real potential there. It's interesting that you're pointing out a potential of crypto that requires the

constriction of supply and requires the invention of the very luxury that at least ethically you are against in these other domains, like college education. I'm against it when it comes to public. I'm against it when it comes to education. I think scarcity, artificial scarcity is quite frankly probably the best business strategy in history. It's the reason I own an iPhone. It's the reason I buy $1,200 Brunoinello Cuccinelli, cashmere tops that make me feel 56 again. I don't think we should all be walking around in uniforms for the lowest cost possible. I think scarcity and aspirational value and being one of the

billion wealthiest people in the world with my iPhone that signals I'm more creative and I'm a better storyteller and that you're more likely if you have sex with me, your kids are more likely to survive because I wear a panoroi, not a saco. I buy into all of that and I think there's nothing wrong with it. I think our public institutions are public servants. And I understand that not everyone has a birthright to go to a good school. I understand that Harvard probably is never going to be nor should be 150,000 people. But when UCLA has to take its admissions rates from 76% to 6%, we're just missing out on a lot of great human capital that could be generals, could be representatives, could be great judges, could be great heads of nonprofit. We're just missing a ton of great human capital

is spilling off the side into the wastewater, especially among young men. So I don't like, I don't like scarcity as a strategy in public education. Now, back to coins or tokens. Bitcoin is genius because of scarcity. It's figured out a way with math problems and energy consumption and that it has scarcity credibility. People believe that Bitcoin has more discipline than the U.S. dollar. People tell me when the Fed's going to stop printing money. No one, no one, no one knows, no one believes it's ever going to do it. Tell me when Bitcoin's going to stop mining. People say 21 million coins, and they believe it. And this kind of genius method around, it gets more expensive and harder and greater energy consumption with every incremental coin is kind of a genius strategy. So it's

become sort of a legitimate store value. Ethereum, I believe it's going to be worth more in terms of market cap than Bitcoin at some point, because it does appear to have utility. It seems like the majority of these NFTs are being minted there. So I would go, coins, there's a consolidation taking, rapid consolidation taking place. I think everything else is probably going to zero. NFTs, I'm bullish on, Dow's Q legal construct. Metaverse, that's a complicated question. There's already a ton of metaverses.

You know, Epic is a metaverse. FIFA, you know, Twitter are all metaverses and they all work really well. VR, I think, is totally overhyped. 40 to 60% of people who put an Oculus on within 20 minutes. that's report feeling nauseous. In what is arguably the most striking symbol of arrogance of any corporation, META believes that it can take gaming, entertainment, education, and work, and create a metaverse around all of that.

When the gaming industry has been at it for 40 years and has created one competent metaverse, and that's around gaming. So the Oculus is, in my opinion, dead on arrival. And this notion that meta can build a kind of a parallel, universe, I could not have thought of a strategy to better kneecap meta than what they have decided to do. I just, I love it. I've been a big critic of it all the time for the last few years. I think it is insane. I think they'd be better off taking $15 billion into the street and burning it and having a bonfire with it. I think that would create more shareholder value.

I just, I don't get it. AR, huge potential. VR. It'll go the same place than most kind of cutting edge technology, laser disks, it'll be for video games and porn. I just don't see, I think VR is an enormous head fake. AR, walking around with your iPhone, holding it up to an apartment in Soho and saying, I'd like to live here, and it shows you which apartments are available, and you can click on a button, immediately start messaging the broker, all kinds of, you flip on your phone and, you know, you get to see who's single. I mean, there's all kinds of cool things of AR, and I think Apple's going to dominate. I'm not a big fan of glasses or putting anything on your head. I think that one thing that snap and meta and now Apple get wrong is that people are very particular about what they will put on

their face. Specifically, they want to signify, they want to raise their cheekbones because that communicates they're less prone to infection or their offspring will be. So people only put shit on their face that makes them look more youthful or makes them look just more attractive as a mate. And I I don't think any of these things do that. So I'm very skeptical of stuff going on our face. I think it's a while before that happens. I'm so glad that I got the tech takes. Scott Galloway, thank you so, so much.

Derek, I'm just parroting back all your stuff. I'm the old dog learning new tricks from the young dog. It was a pleasure to learn at the feet of the old dog. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Derek. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you for listening.

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