TED Talks Daily - Why young people are worse off than their parents — and what to do about it | Scott Galloway and Chris Anderson

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

In this special conversation, NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway and head of TED Chris Anderson dive deeper into Galloway’s explosive recent TED Talk, which has been seen by millions and ignited conversations about what he calls “the great intergenerational theft,” or how older generations are stealing prosperity from the young. With razor-sharp insights on the skyrocketing cost of housing, the mental health crisis created by social media, reckless government spending and more, Galloway explores bold solutions to the most pressing issues facing young people — and delivers a few spectacular rants along the way. (If you’ve already seen Galloway's TED Talk, skip ahead to 20:25.)

TED Audio Collective. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Soon after we published NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway's 2024 TED Talk, it catapulted up the rankings to become one of the most watched talks of the year. In it, Galloway makes the case that the world we're leaving for future generations is worse off and that there's work to do to turn things around. Galloway sat down with head of TED,

Chris Anderson, to dig deeper into the themes brought up in his provocative talk and focus on solutions he's outlined for a brighter future. First, you'll hear Scott provocative talk, and focus on solutions he's outlined for a brighter future. First, you'll hear Scott's talk, followed by his conversation with Chris. Take a listen if you haven't already heard the talk or skip ahead to the conversation. Please note this episode contains some mature language and it's all coming up after the break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb.

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Questions about business, tech, and society, like, is everyone pretending to understand inflation? Why don't we have flying cars yet? And what does it feel like to believe in God? If you find this world bewildering, but also sometimes enjoy being bewildered by it, check out Search Engine with PJ Vogt, available now wherever you get your podcasts. And now, our TED Talk of the day. Hello and welcome, TED members. It's very, very, very, very good to see you.

I'm the head of TED, Chris Anderson. I'm a TED head, apparently. And really excited to be here with you. We're actually doing something we haven't done before. We are going to watch together a smash hit TED Talk in the presence of the man who gave that talk, Scott Galloway. I'm going to introduce to you in a minute. While we're watching that talk, you can comment away, ask questions, talk with each other, disagree, amplify, laugh, whatever strikes you as the right thing to do. And when the talk's over,

we'll be putting questions to Scott and seeing how he can possibly defend the outrageous claims that he makes in this talk. This talk is a very big deal. He's outlining a giant problem, making some big, bold solutions on what we might do about it. It's a big wow. And it's been seen by millions of people already. But we want to dig deeper into these questions. And there couldn't be a better group of people to do it than you. So thank you for being part of this. You are awesome.

I think, let's see, yeah, there's a live transcript to this event if you need it by clicking on the captions option. So I think that's it. So I would like to welcome the, how do we describe Scott Galloway? Well, I mean, he's a professor at NYU, business professor. He's the host of an ungodly number of podcasts, incredibly successful. He does all kinds of things. He's been a successful entrepreneur and a general troublemaker. And it's a delight to welcome Scott Galloway here. Scott, hello. Nice to have you. It's good to be with you, Chris. Thanks for having me. And hello to all TED acolytes and members. All righty. So I don't know if you've ever done this either. I wouldn't be at all uncomfortable to watch yourself in full glory giving this talk that was so well received.

But let's try it. Let us roll this video without further ado. My name is Scott Galloway, a teacher at NYU, and I appreciate your time. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm actually a global television star. True story. I've had four TV series in the last three years. Two of them had been canceled before they were launched, and two were canceled within six weeks.

Let's recap. If we want to juice this thing, if we want to put a cattle prod up the ass of the economy. Bloomberg, the most trusted name in financial news. Not for long. I'm going to do whatever I can for this country of ours. Oh, Jesus Christ. Jesus, come on, dude. You're 0 for 2. Are'm going to do whatever I can for this country of ours. Oh, Jesus Christ. Jesus, come on, dude. You're 0 for 2.

Are you used to it? Face for podcasting. So, first insight of the day. I'd like to be the first person to welcome you to the last test. Okay. By the way, it's clear. What's it called? What are we here for?

The brave and the brilliant. It's clear that Chris is's it called? What are we here for? The Brave and the Brilliant? It's clear that Chris is a frustrated soap opera producer. Essentially, what we have here is a telenovela where, after a night of unbridled passion between Bill Gates and Malcolm Gladwell, they give birth to their bastard love child, Simon Sinek.

It starts with a question. Do we love our children? Sounds like an illegitimate question, right? Well, I'm going to try and convince you otherwise. Essentially, as we go down generations, we're seeing that for the last two generations, people are making less money on an inflation-adjusted basis. In addition, the cost of buying a home,

the cost of pursuing education continues to skyrocket. So the purchasing power, the prosperity, is inversely correlated to age. Simply put, as we get younger, we're taking away opportunity and prosperity from our youngest. The social contract that is now no longer in place, and for the first time in the US's history, a 30-year-old is no longer doing as well,

is that his or her parents were at 30. This is a breakdown in the fundamental agreement in the US's history, a 30-year-old is no longer doing as well as his or her parents were at 30. This is a breakdown in the fundamental agreement we have with any society, and it creates rage and shame. As a result, people over the age of 55 feel pretty good about America, but less than one in five people under the age of 34 feel very good about America. This creates an incendiary. Righteous movements, cuts to our society end up becoming opportunistic infections,

because generally speaking, young people have a warranted envy, they're pissed off and they're angry that they don't enjoy the same spoils and prosperity that were provided to our generation. A decent proxy for how much we value youth's labor is minimum wage, and we've kept it purposely pretty low. If it had just kept pace with productivity, it'd be at about 23 bucks a share, but we've kept it purposely pretty low. If it had just kept pace with productivity, it'd be at about 23 bucks a share,

but we've decided to purposely keep it low. Out of reach. Median home price has skyrocketed relative to median household income. As a result, pre-pandemic, the average mortgage payment was $1,100. It's now $2,300 because of acceleration in interest rates and the fact that the average home has gone from 290,000 to 420,000. By the way, the most expensive homes in the world, based on this metric, are number three, Vancouver.

Why? Because 60 percent of the cost of building a home goes to permits. Because guess what? The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants to ever get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth. This is the transfer I'm going to be speaking about. This has resulted in an enormous transfer of wealth, where people over the age of 70 used to control 19 percent of household income versus people under the age of 40 used to control 12.

Their wealth has been cut in half. This isn't by accident, it's purposeful. When I applied to UCLA, the admissions rate was 76 percent. Today, it's nine percent. I received a 2.23 GPA from UCLA. I learned nothing but how to make bongs out of household items in every line from Planet of the Apes. In the greatest public school in the world,

Berkeley decided to let me in with a 2.27 GPA. And that's what higher ed is about. Higher ed is about taking unremarkable kids and giving them a shot at being remarkable. And every year, it's gotten more expensive. Higher ed and homes and the ability, not only is higher ed incredibly expensive, it's not accessible,

because me and my colleagues are drunk on luxury, and I'll come back to that. We've embraced the ultimate strategy. Me and my colleagues in higher ed wake up every morning and ask ourselves the same question when we look in the mirror. How can I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability? And we have found the ultimate strategy. It's called an LVMH strategy, where we artificially constrain supply to create aspiration and scarcity,

such that we can raise tuition faster than inflation. And old people and wealthy people have done the same thing with housing. All of a sudden, once you own a home, you become very concerned with traffic, and you make sure that there's no new housing permits. And here is a memo to my colleagues in higher ed. We're public servants, not fucking Chanel bags. Harvard is the best example of this.

They've increased their endowment in the last 40 years and have decided to expand their enrollment, their freshman class, by four percent. Any university that doesn't grow their freshman class faster than population that has over a billion dollars in endowment should lose their tax-free status because they're no longer in higher education, they're a hedge fund offering classes. My first recommendation,

Biden should take some of that $750 billion earmarked to bail out the one-third of people that got to go to college on the backs of the two-thirds that didn't, and give a billion dollars to our 500 greatest public institutions, size-adjusted, in exchange for three things. One, they use technology and scale to reduce tuition by 2% a year, expand enrollments by 6 percent a year, and increase the number of vocational certifications

and nontraditional four-year degrees by 20 percent. Where does that get us? In just 10 years, in just 10 years, that doubles the freshman seats and cuts the cost in half. This isn't radical. This is called college in the 80s and 90s. Another transfer of wealth. Look at what's happened to wages.

Oh, they've gone up, not as much as corporate profits. There's a healthy tension between capital and labor. For the last 40 years, capital has been kicking the shit out of labor. Well, you think, whoa, what about wages, right? They've gone up. Well, if you compare them to the S&P, they barely register.

It's been an amazing time to own assets, but your attempt to get the certification or the income such that you can acquire assets has gotten harder and harder. In my class of 300 kids, it's never been easier to be a billionaire, it's never been harder to be a millionaire. By the way, our job in higher ed isn't to identify a top one percent of people who are freakishly remarkable or have rich parents and turn them into a superclass of billionaires

is to give the bottom 90 a chance to be in the top 10. You know who doesn't need me or higher education? The top 10 percent. The whole point of higher ed is to give the unremarkables, i.e. yours truly, who was raised by a single immigrant mother, a shot of being remarkable. The transfer has been purposeful. While the cohorts, corporations and the ultra-wealthy

continue to garner more and more of our wealth, we have decided, I know, if they win the gold, let's give them the silver and the bronze and let's lower their taxes. This transfer is purposeful. It's not by accident. And it works. Senior poverty is way down, and we should celebrate that. Meanwhile, child poverty is flat to up.

The third rail. I'm going to talk about Social Security. It would cost $11 billion to expand the child tax credit, but that got stripped out of the infrastructure bill. But the additional $135 billion a year to Social Security, that flies right through Congress. And every year, we transfer $1.4 trillion from a cohort that is increasingly doing less well

to the cohort that is the wealthiest cohort in the history of this planet. I'm not against Social Security, but the criteria should be if you need it, not whether you have a catheter. It is bankrupting our nation, and we have fallen under this mythology that somehow it's this great social program. No, it's not.

It's the great transfer of wealth from young to old. How is this happening? Because our representatives are in fact representative. Old people vote. Washington has become a cross between the land of the dead and the Golden Girls. Quite frankly, this is fucking ridiculous. And if I sound ageist,

if I sound ageist, I am. And you know who else is ageist? Biology. When Speaker Pelosi had her first child, get this, two-thirds of households didn't have color televisions, and Castro had just declared martial law. But she's supposed to understand the challenges of a 17-year-old girl who's 5'9", 95 pounds, getting tips on dieting and extreme dieting from Facebook. She's supposed to understand the challenges that a 27-year-old single mother face. The great intergenerational theft

took place under the auspices of a virus. I know. Let's use the greatest health crisis in the century to really speedball the transfer from 2008 to 2012. We let the markets crash. And by the way, you need churn, you need disruption, because it seeds and recalibrates advantage and wealth from the incumbents to the entrants.

It's a natural part of the cycle. But wait, lately, no, a million people dying would be bad. But what would be tragic is if we let the NASDAQ go down and guys like me lost wealth. So we pumped the economy, which again, increased the massive transfer of wealth. The best two years of my life? COVID.

More time with my kids, more time with Netflix, and my value of my stocks absolutely exploded. And who has to pay for my prosperity? Not me. Future generations who will have to deal with an unprecedented level of debt. Why am I here, and why do I get the prosperity I enjoy? Because in 2008, we bailed out the banks, but we didn't bail out the economy.

We let the markets fall. Where does a young person find disruption? When you bail out the baby boomer owner of a restaurant, all you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 26-year-old graduate of a culinary academy that wants her shot. We need disruption. We're economically attacking the young, but I know.

Let's attack their emotional and mental well-being. Let's take advantage of the fact of the flaws in our species with medieval institutions, Paleolithic instincts and godlike technology. I'm just going to say, I think Mark Zuckerberg has done more damage to young people in our nation while making more money than any person in history. Oh, but wait, what could be worse?

It's as if we let an adversary implant a neural jack into our youth to raise a generation of civic, military and business leaders that hate America. How can we be this stupid? All right, this all adds up to a bunch of graphs all headed up into the right. And what are they? What's the first one?

Oh, that's self-harm rates, which have exploded, especially among girls, since my colleague Jonathan Haidt pointed out it's really, really gone crazy since social went on mobile. What's the next one? Teens with depression. The next one, men and women not having sex. Biggest fear of my parents was that I was going to get in too much trouble.

My biggest fear, honestly, is that my kids aren't going to get into enough trouble. By the way, my advice is go out, drink more, and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off. Next graph, cumulative gun deaths. You're more likely to be shot in the United States if you're a toddler or an infant than a cop. Next graph, obesity gun deaths. You're more likely to be shot in the United States if you're a toddler or an infant than a cop. Next graph, obesity, way up. By the way, the industrial food complex wants to addict you to shitty, fatty food

so they can hand you over to the industrial diabetes complex. We should not romanticize obesity. You're not finding your fucking truth, you're finding diabetes. Overdose deaths, way up. Deaths of despair. When I was in high school, it was drunk driving. Now it's kids killing themselves. Young people don't want to have kids anymore.

Two-thirds of people aged 30 to 34, able-bodied, used to decide to have at least one child. It's been cut in half. It's now less than a third, 27%. As a result, people over the age of 60 in the US, pretty happy. People under the age of 30, not so much. Some of the lowest in the free world. What can we do? Nothing wrong with America.

It can't be fixed with what's right with it. We got the hard stuff figured out. There are programs to address all of these issues. They cost a lot of money. That's the hard part. And we have figured this out. In just five minutes, post an earnings call, we can add a quarter of a trillion dollars to the economy. We've got the hard part figured out, the resources.

We have the money, but we decide not to do it. Things are doable. We increase minimum wage to 25 bucks an hour. It goes into the economy. The wonderful things about low- and middle-income households is they spend all their money. We have to have a restore or a progressive tax structure with alternative minimum tax on corporations and wealthy individuals.

We need to refund the IRS. We need to reform Social Security. It should be based on whether you need the money, not on how old you are. We need a negative income tax. My friend Andrew Yang screwed up a great idea, but he branded it incorrectly. Instead of calling it UBI,

he should have got Republicans on board by calling it a negative income tax. We need to eliminate the capital gains tax deduction. When did we decide that the money that capital earns is more noble than the money that sweat earns? Shouldn't it be flipped? We need to remove 230 protection for all algorithmically elevated content. We need identity verification. The reason we can have identity verification

is because we have a First Amendment. Break up big tech. We have monopolies that are incurring greater and greater costs on every small business and parents, because again, see above, our representatives don't understand these technologies. We need to age-gate social media. There's absolutely no reason anyone under the age of 16

should ever be on social media. We need universal pre-K. We need to reinstate the expanded child tax credit. We need term limits. We need income-based affirmative action. Any visible signs of affirmative action make no sense at all. You would rather be born gay or non-white in the United States today than poor, and that's a sign of our progress

and our need to recalibrate who we give advantage to. Affirmative action, of which I'm a beneficiary of, I got Pell Grants, I got unfair advantage. Affirmative action is a wonderful thing, and it should be based on color. It should be based on green, how much money you have or don't have. Expand college enrollment and vocational programs, mental health, banned phones in schools, invest in third places, Big Brothers and Sisters programs. We need national service. We need to tell people in the United States and Canada that they live in the greatest countries in the world, and we need to remind them of that every day

by exposing them to other great Americans where they feel connected to issue. We can do all of this. This is the whole shooting match. Anybody here without kids, ask someone with kids. You have your world of work, you have your world of friends, you have your world of kids. Something happens here, your whole world shrinks to this.

So I present as I wrap here, which is a few questions. One, if you acknowledge that our kids are the most important thing in our lives, that everything else we do here is meaningful, but our kids' well-being and prosperity is profound. If you acknowledge that they're doing more poorly than previous generations, if you believe there's a chance that the illusion of complexity has done nothing to provide cloud cover for the unbelievable transfer of goodwill, of well-being and of

prosperity from young to old, and if you believe we can actually fix these problems and we have the resources, then I present to you, I posit, I augur the question that I hope has more veracity than it did 17 minutes and 24 seconds ago, and that's the following question. Do we love our children? My name is Scott Galloway, I teach at NYU, and I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Thank you. We cut off the standing O. That was a long, long standing O. it was as long as i was at ted this year scott um an amazing talk honestly i i want to ask you a bit about almost just the actual your style of speaking because i think it's it's remarkable but i'm going to start here just this thing's been seen by five plus million people around the world already and growing. It's the biggest single hit coming out of the last TED. I'm curious what feedback you've had from it.

I mean, you were pretty you laid out some pretty savage criticisms of a lot of people that have some of them come back hard at you. Have you mainly been amplified and cheered on? And give us a sense of the feedback on this. has been exceptionally positive. Not yesterday, but the day before yesterday, I was on a Zoom call where I spoke after Speaker Pelosi and before Senators Blumenthal and Blackburn and talking specifically about my recommendations around big tech. I don't know if I'll be invited back because I did not hold back,

but it's been, you know, let me talk about it. It's been overwhelmingly positive. It's been everything from billionaires reaching out and saying, I have a philanthropy and I'd like your help allocating some of our resources to someone. Send me a screenshot of an account with $10 million in it and said, it's yours if you run for president in 2028, to which I responded, I have no interest in that, but I'd really enjoy spending the weekend in Vegas with you.

It's been really positive. So the points of pushback that I think are interesting, and I want to be clear, I get it wrong all the time. I'd like to think that some or even most of this is directionally correct, but what I know for certain is some of it is wrong. I got pushback around Social Security from representatives, from seniors, that this is the most successful social program in the world, and that I shouldn't be demonizing old people for taking out something they've already contributed to. I've got pushback for fat shaming. So I've gotten points of pushback, but I think that's important.

I think that if you're gonna make provocative statements, you need to be subject to pushback. And I would say that my goal is not to be right. It's to catalyze a conversation such that we can craft better solutions. And the thing that's been really rewarding about this dialogue is that when people send me very long emails, including from Congress and the Senate

and people who run companies and nonprofits, the dialogue's been very civil. And I would say that the thing that I really enjoy or recognize about the TED community is I'm in a variety of different communities, whether it's TikTok or whether it's at different conferences where I say these things. And the dialogue this has inspired has been remarkably more civil. It's been more, you know, I like this, I didn't like this, but I really appreciate that the medium is the message. You know, people are more civil on LinkedIn than they are on Twitter. And I have found so far, people are much more civil on TED than other platforms. Well, that's nice to hear. We

definitely, though, don't want people to hold back. And I know that in the comments, there are some people who've pushed back on specific aspects of the talk. But which of the various proposals and things that we could actually do about this problem do you think have most chance of actually moving forward? Because, I mean, it's so wide ranging. You know, it's like it's very hard for young people to get to college now, hard to get a house. And then, you know, all the way up to social security and so forth. Where do you think there's most traction, Scott, something that might actually shift? I think there's already a movement underway to expand freshman class at elite colleges, to invest more in vocational programs, to reverse this vibe or gestalt of higher ed as a luxury brand and return it to being a public

servant. I think that movement was already underway and it feels like there's a lot of momentum there. And some of the stats have really freaked people out. There's 10 to one MIT employees for every person who teaches. So I've heard from the president of ASU saying, and the presidents of Purdue saying, come here. And they've been circulating my talk and raising money around the fact that they are not, they have not embraced this strategy. I think we're seeing, I've heard from quite a few people in the budget office and Congress people talking about things including eliminating capital gains tax or just having one income tax similar to what we had under Reagan,

instead of favoring the income that capital earns or wealthier people versus current income. I have heard a decent amount around the idea of just generally speaking tax reform. How do we put more money in young people's pockets? And then from what I'll call the retail media, whether it's Morning Joe or The View, which I've been on since this talk, it's we need to change the narrative and stop criticizing young people and saying that their depression, their anxiety, their obesity is a function of their entitlement and not a function of public policy that people of my age have implemented. That, that,

okay, maybe there is some truth to some of their disappointment. So let me, before we go into the other details on it, let me pick up that specific point, because there is, I'm sure that some people watching this, maybe probably older people, would say, are you sure it's really this intentional thing as opposed to a consequence of just cultural cycles? So there's this quote that you will know by Michael Knopf that, you know, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. There's an argument that we've been through so much prosperity that, you know, baby boomers raised, you know, a generation of kids who just grew up too comfortable.

And that is where part of the problem is. You are halfly arguing a different case. Is there any truth to that argument? I think in almost every generation before ours, I'll call it Gen X and baby boomers, there was a concerted effort to elect people who would think long-term and make forward-leaning investments. If you think about Apple, Google, Nvidia, all of these companies, Moderna, that have added trillions of dollars in market cap, it's really they build a thick layer of innovation on top of investments that have been made by the most successful venture capitalists in history, and that's the US government with its limited partners, its investors, the middle class.

And that there's a lack of that forward-leaning investment. Basically the only thing that passes for bipartisan cooperation now is reckless spending. Republicans want more military spending and lower taxes. Democrats want more social spending and higher taxes, and they agree on lower taxes and more spending. So it does feel like we are being irresponsible, even reckless. The way I loosely describe it is $7 trillion in government spending, which juices the economy, $5 trillion in receipts. I'm in the club partying with champagne and cocaine, and the closest the young people get to the club is they can throw their credit card at me from downstairs, and I'll rack up more debt

on their back so I can continue this prosperity. Even the markets right now, we don't want to talk about this. The markets are being supported right now by an additional $2 trillion in stimulus every year in the form of government spending that's beyond our revenues. In past generations, unless it was wartime, never would have engaged or supported that type of government spending. So I do think there's something different here. I think the financialization of everything, Chris, where, as they said in Jerry Maguire, more money used to be a bigger seat in business class. Now it's a better life. And the fact that we haven't faced really any external threats to rally us together to create more comity of man or more patriotism, there just seems to be not the same sense of selflessness or investment mindset there's been with past generations.

I mean, one of the most powerful aspects of the talk, and there were so many powerful aspects, was your juxtaposition of different stats. So Harvard, this explosive growth in the endowment, and, you know, no more students being admitted. I mean, you immediately know when you just put those numbers together, that there's something very, very wrong with that picture. So powerful. I thought your line about just showing minimum wage has just not remotely caught up with the way at which capital is growing. And I wonder whether one, you know, there's almost like some political ideas that we could push out there that said things like that a society is not operating justly

if the rate rate its minimum wage rate is growing slower than the rate at which capital is appreciating it shouldn't be linked to inflation or even wages it should be linked to the rate at which capital is appreciating in the you know in in that society otherwise inequality is absolutely bound to increase. And I'm curious which others of those have landed, like with social security, for example. I understand why people have pushed back. Do you see any workable kind of middle ground here where you could say, look, social security is important, we're not going to take the whole thing away. But we have to make it more just. We can't have it sucking more and more of the next generation's time. And what is the right metric to think about how much Social Security could be

trimmed to be fair to the generation coming through? That feels like one of the biggest numbers. Right. So I've had a bunch of calls with people, different people in Congress and different PACs about Social Security. So means testing and moving the age back, right? And the majority of people just even 100 years ago didn't participate in Social Security because they were dead by that time. Now they're living 20 and 30 years beyond that. People will say, well, I invested in it.

I want it back. I'd say first, it's called a tax, not a pension fund, meaning that it might be distributed to other people. Two, people who live to be 85 take out two to three times more than they put in. So I think, I'm not saying we should do away with it. I'm just saying if somebody, it should be means tested. The age should be pushed back to reflect that people are working much longer. Also, just basics. The person who put together this slide, Mia, makes $160,000 a year, and I'm allowed to say that with her permission. She's 26, very talented young woman.

She pays $9,000 a year or 6% in Social Security. This year, I'll make 100 times that, and I'll pay, wait for it, $9,000 in social security income tax. It's capped for anyone making over $160,000. So if this generation is the wealthiest generation in history, why have we decided to cap social security for rich people? So I don't have a problem with stimulus. I don't have a problem with social programs. But Social Security is another example, yet again, of we are really taxing. Six percent is a real number for young people their whole life. But it's been de minimis for me because I'm old and wealthy. So it's another example of how this transfer under the cover of dark that wealthy people are in there saying, well, position this tax is onerous, but we're going to cap it like it's a good thing at 6%. Why is Jeff Bezos not paying 6% of his income into Social Security?

It's an off-balance sheet item. It doesn't impact the deficit. It's funded every year. But right now, 40% of all government spending is allocated for programs that go to seniors. It's about to be 50% in 10 years at this rate, which means that crowds out investments in forward-leaning investments, such as education and technology. And we also just need to acknowledge, and this sounds ageist and it is, old people are less productive and more expensive. And so unless we figure out a way to acknowledge that they spend a longer period of their lives being

expensive and unproductive, our economy is basically just going to be an engine to kind of support the most expensive nursing home in the world. This is happening in Japan, it's happening in Italy, and it takes an economy into decline because you can't make forward leaning investments that encourage wealth or inspire wealth for young people. And they don't have kids. In terms of minimum wage, this is an easy one. I've been positioned as anti-union. I'm not. There should be one union. It should be in DC and it should be federally mandated minimum wage, 25 bucks an hour, except in certain areas where there's an exceptionally low cost of living. And people will start, the incumbents and corporations will start this bullshit narrative of it'll kill the economy. No, it won't. In

Washington State and California, where they raise minimum wage, the economy actually grew because the wonderful thing about low and middle income people is they spend all of their money, meaning the multiplier effect is greater. If it had just kept pace with productivity and inflation, it'd be 23 bucks. That's an easy one. Mandatory, federally mandated, 25 bucks an hour. Would McDonald's and Walmart stock take a huge hit? Sure. Would a bunch of small businesses go out of business? Yes.

And it'd be worth it. So as you say, you don't hold back. And there were definitely a few things in the talk that provoked comment. So Pyra Gaunt, I see in the chat, found your comment about diabetes a bit smug. Um, she says there are epigenetics to consider. It's complicated for members of marginalized groups. And you say you've heard from other people on that is that you want to

clarify your, your, your view on that at all. It's a fair feedback as someone who was born to parents who are both tall and thin. So easy for you to say, Scott. What I have said in the past, and if I sound offensive, I apologize, is I believe that we need, bottom line, to put more money in the pockets of lower income people such that they can eat better. I think we need to tax the food industrial complex relative to its externalities. Obesity, morbid obesity has gone from five to 9% in the last 30 years.

Obesity has gone from, I believe it's gone from 30 to 45%. The only thing that Americans really share is that 70% of us are overweight or obese. And if you look at McDonald's, Kraft, General Foods, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, they're not companies as much as they are obesity indices. And their stocks have gone up 10 to 12x as obesity has gone up. And if you give those two, their stocks and obesity rates to a statistician, they will tell you they are highly correlated. So as a result,

because there's money in the diabetes industrial complex, we have Unilever celebrating obese women. We have people saying you're finding your truth. And this is from the same company that sells Ben and Jerry's and Axe, which basically encourages young men to fuck anything. So the notion that they are concerned about or trying to liberate people or all of these apparel companies saying that you're finding your truth. I want to go back to the 60s where Kennedy said it was American and patriotic to be in great shape. I used to train every year for the Presidential Fitness Awards, and that was seen as fat shaming,

so they did away with it. I don't think there's anything wrong with celebrating fitness, but also at the same time recognizing some people are dealt a difficult hand genetically and providing them with money and resources so they can get out of food deserts. I also believe GLP-1 drugs are the most impressive technology of the last year, not AI, and we should be pushing them into low-income communities. I think they're an absolute game changer right now. Here's a crazy stat. The region of America that has the greatest penetration of GLP-1 prescriptions is also the thinnest. It's the Upper East Side, because right

now GLP-1 drugs are being used for ladies of lunch who want to lose that last 10 pounds. I hope that more and more of it is imported illegally across the border, where it's 100 bucks a month versus 1,000, and it gets to the people who really need it, which is low-income people who don't have the money for diabetes, because the industrial food complex wants you to be obese, so they can hand you over to the medical industrial complex of hip replacements, kidney dialysis, knee replacements, heart stents. That's an enormous industry. I want to put Coca-Cola, Kraft, McDonald's, and some of these hospital systems absolutely out of business. There's too much incentive to convince you that being obese is some sort of personal liberation.

It's not. So this is so interesting. Like somehow, and I feel this for Ted as well, we have to figure out how to have conversations about difficult topics that are respectful of people. And, you know, everyone's, as you say, has been dealt a different hand, but that don't ignore the basic facts of health or of science. And that is what is so hard to do in the current environment right now. We've all got frightened, I think, of saying the kind of thing that you just said. And there probably are still, I don't know, Cara, how you felt about what he replied there, but I feel like we need to do both you know we we need to be provocative and also respectful and i i heard that in you so i think that's that's cool um and then again actually um not to pick on karen but she also i noticed that she pushed back on your um point about social

media that you know one of the fixes is to get younger kids off social media, points out, and I've felt this reading John Haidt's work myself, that those communities that people connect with on social media sometimes are incredibly beneficial. So you think of the kid who's queer or is struggling with something and doesn't find anyone in their community who they can connect with, finds a community online. I mean, there's presumably some benefit in that.

Is there any way of making recommendations where there aren't swings and roundabouts, there aren't, you know, sort of downsides to what we recommend? Look, one in five LGBTQ high schoolers is going to try and kill themselves. So I'm involved with the Jed Foundation that works with high schools to try and identify or distinguish between kind of what is normal, abnormal teen behavior and suicidal ideation. Because we have a, really, we do have an epidemic of self-harm at a teen level. And there's just not getting around it. Some trans and gay kids and other kids from special interest groups find other people like them on social media.

I guess the question would be, if banning social media under the age of 16 or age gating it on the whole were demonstrated to be an absolute huge net positive, because I think a lot of those communities are actually the subjects of incredible bullying and shaming online and are more prone to go down bullying and shaming online and are

more prone to go down a rabbit hole of depression and end up in self-harm. Are there other programs that could replace that incredible community some of them have found? But look, when you make huge government decisions, there is no decision where there's not going to be losers. I mean, the special interest group kid who finds people online at 14 when social media is age gated, yeah, that person suffers. I guess the argument I would make is that if you were to look at any study about the general impact it's having on people under the age of 16, the benefits dramatically outweigh the soft tissue here. So the question is, could we do it, but at the same time recognize we still have an enormous self-harm problem among kids, especially in the LBGTQ community, and move in with other programs or other analog means of

helping them find other people. But I want to acknowledge there's just nothing I recommend that doesn't have a downside. And now back to the episode. So some people are asking about practical things we can do. So Adrian Neubauer said, as an elementary school teacher, what's your advice for helping Gen Alpha students? I don't want my students to grow up having such apathy towards learning and being successful. I definitely don't want my students' highest aspirations to be TikTok influencers. How do I help? How do I help them? Well, the first thing is, I think this is an easy one. I don't think there's any reason for anyone under the age of 16 to be on social media. I think we need a massive investment. I think we need to tax every person in a private school and use that capital to invest in afterschool programs and third places. I went to public schools all the way through graduate school. I went back to my

high school, university high school, and 93% are kids of color. It's got the unfortunate designation of having the greatest proportion of kids who are classified as homeless in LAUSD. And they just cut their drill team. They just cut their band, their drum line, because they don't have money. I just think so much of this, Chris, unfortunately. It's like households with a lot of anxiety. It sounds very crass, but I think a lot of problems are solved with money. Show me divorce, and I'm usually going to show you some sort of economic stress or poor alignment around economics. And when you can add a quarter of a trillion dollars in five minutes post the earning call of NVIDIA, and at the same time, you see corporations are

paying their lowest taxes since 1939, and the top 25 wealthiest Americans are paying a tax rate of 6%. And five companies have added the value of the entire global auto industry in the last six weeks. We have the resources. So I think a lot of this comes down to funding, giving kids more third places such that they're not staring at their phones and also demanding that parents and demanding that entire school systems go phone free and that there's no social media. And on a more tactical level, I absolutely think we need to ban or divest TikTok. I think it makes absolutely no sense to be raising a generation of civic, military, and nonprofit leaders who hate America, and it's all wrapped in cute dances. I just think it's insane that we would be this stupid. One of the wonderful things about America

is our optimism, but one of the downsides of that is we're much easier to fool than convince we've been fooled. I think every day we're being fooled by TikTok. I think this is the most unbelievable propaganda tool in history. Unfortunately, it's not ours. You mentioned NVIDIA there, which has exploded in value in the last couple of years, last year, really. Isn't that to some extent a counter argument to your earlier comment about you had this unique opportunity to buy these cheap stocks like Netflix and Amazon at low prices. I mean, there are always, has the market fundamentally changed that aren't that kind of opportunity for smart people to identify trends and get the same kind of wealth?

Was it just a timing thing? No, what we've decided is we want capitalism on the way up. We want low taxes and the pioneer, the individual who earned the money and should pay a low tax rate because he or she is the most productive citizen. And on the way down, when there's a virus or some exogenous event, which happened a lot, whether it's war, famine, revolution, or a virus, the CEO of Delta says, we're all in this together and wants a massive bailout, despite the fact that 80% of the free cashflow of airlines the 10 years before were either used on dividend or stock buybacks or CEO compensation that juice their compensation. And yet, so look, capitalism on the way up and

socialism on the way down is cronyism. And we've gone full cronyist in the United States. And I understand the rationale for pumping the economy full of stimulus, because I said we needed to overdo it versus underdo it. But then no one suggested a special tax for the unbelievable champagne and cocaine disco party we've had in the markets. Markets are touching all times highs right now. And the myth that my generation has fomented across the economy, that young people take hook, line and sinker is the following. There are two phases of everyone's life. There's investing, and then there's the harvesting phase. Investing is when you do your best to make more than you spend and save some money so you can deploy an army of capital that

grows in your sleep such that you can have some security and some balance as you get older and you begin harvesting. I'm entering the harvesting stage of my life where I'm no longer making as much as I spend. During the investment part of your life, when you're younger years, you want markets to crash. You want real estate that's inexpensive. You want a dollar cost average in at the low. The reason I get to roll with you in London and I get to go to the south of France tomorrow, Chris, is because we let the markets crash in 08 and I got to buy Netflix at 12 bucks, which is at 650 now. What we've decided now purposefully is that we aren't going to let the markets have a natural cycle of disruption, that anytime the markets are threatened, we're going to weigh in with the credit card of our young friends, of our daughters and our sons,

and we're going to artificially inflate and support the markets. That is nothing but a transfer of wealth. You need disruption. You need churn. These are purposeful decisions to protect old on the credit card of the young. I don't have a problem with stimulus, but for God's sakes, those of us who have benefited from it should pay it back. So there's a great question here from Brett McCall. So during this talk, there are an overwhelming number of points that are all delivered in an easy-to-understand way. That's true, by the way. I don't know of a talk where there's been such density of points,

of facts that connect, really remarkable. Anyway, he says, it leaves me charged with the desire to join, quote, the movement and make change. It's almost like a full semester worth of issues that could be movements, but there isn't an explicit community or movement to join. Scott, where would you suggest the starting place for someone who becomes inspired by your talk? political, but try and find Congress people or get involved in campaigns of people who are, one, talking about the deficit, talking about the war on young people, having difficult conversations. I mean, there's some very basics. And the speaker before me, Andrew Yang, final five in ranked choice voting, people who are going to be moderates,

who are going to think long-term about society. I think we need absolutely more young people in Congress. So I would say political action, just being engaged. And then on a ground level, getting involved with local schools, getting involved in charities and efforts to help young people in special interest groups find third places, find places to find each other. I think all of this is somewhat couched in young people in an epidemic of loneliness. So anything you can do to create resources and opportunities for young people to get out of the house, I think it's up to parents to get their kids off. I think it's not what to do, it's what not to do. In terms of a political movement, I'm still waiting for a leader to come forward and say, I'm going to piss off everybody.

Old people, you're going to hate me. Unions, you're going to hate me. Rich people, you're going to hate me. We need the biggest class traitor in history. Someone who shows up and says, are we going to decrease government spending or are we going to raise taxes? And the answer is yes. It's time to start acting like adults and paying it back to some of the incredible Americans who have made sacrifices such that we can enjoy this prosperity. I haven't seen that person yet. But politicians assume that that's an unelectable slate.

And maybe they're underestimating the intelligence of their citizens. I think people are ready. Do you know what one of the top three issues among young people is right now? People think it's Middle East. It's not. That's like number 17 because of the zombie apocalypse of useful idiots on campuses that has been highlighted in media and in TikTok to give you the sense that every student is protesting.

2,300 arrests, 41 students. I'm at NYU. 99.9% of the kids are just getting their shit done. The new president, undergraduate president of Columbia is an Israeli girl. Anyways, one of the top issues for young people, one of the top three, the deficit. So I just think we need a pragmatist who says, I am not going to ever insult anyone on the other side of the aisle personally to get on TikTok and raise money. I'm going to talk about really boring shit, tax policy, the deficit, teen depression, obesity, and I'm going to make big sweeping changes. And guess what? All of you are going to suffer, all of you, because there's just no getting around it. We need to make a fraction of the sacrifices that a lot of Americans made 80

years ago. I don't know about you. I was very moved by the D-Day commemorations. But every generation up until this one has made real sacrifice for four generations except this one. So we need to catch up. I think people are ready for that. Scott, you've spent a lot of time giving advice, especially for young men. Do you think that the problem has been especially bad for them for some reason, or that a disproportionate share of the solution will be found by fixing the problems that young men are facing right now? Well, all of these things are especially acute. So with young men, and this is really, this is the thing, this is my passion project, four times as likely to kill themselves,

three times as likely to be addicted, 12 times as likely to be incarcerated. There has been no group globally that's ascended faster than women. More women globally are pursuing tertiary education, which is remarkable when you think about many nations don't allow women to pursue tertiary education. And twice as many women have been elected to parliament over the last 30 years around the world. Now, domestically in the U.S., there has never been a cohort that has fallen further faster than young men. More women, single women, own homes now than single men, which is fantastic. In urban areas, women are out earning men. These things are wonderful.

We don't have a homeless crisis. We have a male homeless crisis. We don't have an opioid addiction crisis. We don't have a homeless crisis. We have a male homeless crisis. We don't have an opioid addiction crisis. We have a male opioid addiction crisis. And unfortunately, something that gets in the way of programs, Chris, is that because of the benefit, the massive benefit, privilege, and advantage that you and I received, we hold these young men accountable. We use words like accountability or pull yourself up by your

bootstraps. If any special interest group was killing themselves at four times the rate of the control group, we'd move in with programs. And I think there just generally needs to be a change in the narrative and the dialogue. And we need to recognize that empathy isn't a zero-sum game. Gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage. Civil rights didn't hurt white people. And recognizing the problems that young men especially are facing, one in three men under the age of 30 hasn't had sex in the last year. Three million working age men have given up looking for work. 50% of millennial men are no longer even trying to date. And so you have this cohort that is doing so poorly. And if we don't have a vibrant

middle class full of successful economically and emotionally viable men, the nation is going to collapse. Because here's the thing about women, we don't want to have an open and honest conversation about mating. And this is the following. Women mate socioeconomically, horizontally and up, men horizontally and down. And when the pool of men available horizontally and up, men horizontally and down. And when the pool of men available horizontally and up keeps shrinking, we're going to have a lack of household formation. 60% of people age 30 to 34, 40 years ago had at least one child. Now it's 27%. The whole shooting match, the whole shooting match, why we engage in all this shit is so we can find someone we love and raise kids together. That is the most rewarding thing. Everything else is a means.

That's the ends. And when a nation is failing to do that and just creating a generation of anxious, obese and depressed kids who don't like themselves, much less have the opportunity to like other people and get together and start having sex and fall in love and have kids and have economic prosperity, then what the fuck is any of this for? So I think this is a call for all hands on deck. If young people and especially young men aren't doing well, then we are not going to have a functioning nation or economy, full stop. And it's time to put the politically correct

agenda away and say, well, you're being sexist. Yeah, I'm sexist. I believe the genders are different. If you don't believe me, put a three-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy in a room with cars and dolls and see what happens. That doesn't mean we reduce empathy for either gender, but we can't even have an honest conversation about this stuff because someone sees an opportunity to virtue signal and get a guardian's a gotcha pin rather than actually addressing the fucking problem. That was a rant. I will say that you rant better than anyone I know. I mean, I really, just as someone who's hosted a lot of TED Talks. I was stunned by how this one went. Like many speaker coaches looking at you would say,

oh, it's very monotone. It's very, you know, where's the, you know, you just sort of, it just unwraps in a very sort of flat voice initially. But every word is so carefully chosen and follows so consequentially to what's just gone before that you tap into a different part of people's brains than most talks do, I think. People go, yes, no, that makes sense. That makes sense. That makes

sense. And then it builds and then your anger and frustration starts to come out and get died up. It's absolutely remarkable rhetoric. I don't know how you learned it or where you got it from, but it's really unique out there i would say and i i think it's an it's a super powerful weapon and i'm i mean i don't know if people listening agree with this like this is a really unusual and a really i mean it's not like everyone will agree with every single word scott that you said but it's it's a it's a really unusual and powerful piece of rhetoric about something that really matters and And for that, I feel, I think we all feel huge gratitude to you and wish you well on this, this continued journey. I mean, it just, there just isn't a more important issue. So bravo to you. Thank you. Chris, I appreciate the generous words.

And what I told my wife is that after 30 years of working my ass off, I'm an overnight success because of Chris Anderson and Ted. So thank you. You had visibility everywhere and you do. It's amazing how much you're out there, your voice is out there. If people don't know it, Scott has his own. Just talk about the two or three podcasts you'd most like people to do, because I think that's the best way to get closer to you. Yeah, to resist is futile. I'm like AOL in the 90s.

If you stick your hand in a cereal box, you're going to find something from Scott Galloway. I have Pivot, I have Prop G, I have my newsletter, No Mercy, No Malice, and a slew of books. So to resist is futile. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty.

Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do. And with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. That was Scott Galloway in conversation with Chris Anderson at a TED membership event in 2024. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.

And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Fazey-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner, Daniela Balarezo, and Will Hennessy. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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