The Chris Cuomo Project - Scott Galloway

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

In this week’s episode of The Chris Cuomo Project, Scott Galloway (Professor of Marketing, NYU School Stern of Business, host, “The Prof G Show” and “Pivot” podcasts, and author, “Adrift: ...America in 100 Charts”) joins Chris to discuss how the media leaves no room for moderates, why nothing in life is ever as good or as bad as it seems, how being attacked by Elon Musk on Twitter impacted his family, the need to level up young men, and much more. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Insights from one of the most desired minds when it comes to business and life, Professor Scott Galloway. Hey, I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project. As always, appreciate you for subscribing, following. I want you to wear your independence. Be a critical thinker and a free agent. You can get it right here on the page.
Starting point is 00:00:21 You click a button, you shop a little bit. Everybody's happy. Now, here's somebody with a reason to be happy, Scott Galloway. And yet, what is he about? He is about the obsession and even the torment of how to be better, how to see how to make systems better, corporations better, and us better as individuals and as a society. He has really been blossoming as kind of a one-man think tank about America's problems and different dynamics in our society. And I was really happy to sit down with him.
Starting point is 00:00:52 One surprise that I'll tell you in advance, a little more about me than I expected in this, but I guess as a case study of how we can be better, who better than that? So Professor Scott Galloway, you know him not just as a professor, but his podcasts and his books and his commentary on America. He's a growing commodity. Here's why. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from PrizePix. I got to tell you, there's a reason PrizePix is America's number one fantasy sports app. Three million members. Why?
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Starting point is 00:02:37 but this is personal to me, and PrizePix gives me the options. And it's fun, and I don't feel like I'm going to get exploited or played by some system that's afoot that I don't understand. So, go to prizepix.com slash CCP and use code CCP for a first deposit match up to $100. Again, go to prizepix.com slash CCP and use code CCP for a first deposit match up to $100. PrizePix. Pick more, pick less. It's that easy. The Chris Cuomo Project is supported by Cozy Earth. Why? Because I like their sheets. That's
Starting point is 00:03:13 why. A lot of people don't get a good night's sleep for a lot of reasons. One of the ones that you can control is bedding. One out of three of us report being sleep deprived. Okay, well, what is it? Well, it stresses all kinds of things, but the wrong sheets can make you hot, can make you cold. I'm telling you, I don't even believe it either, but Cozy Earth sheets breathe. And here's what I love about them. Cozy Earth's best-selling sheet is a bamboo set, okay? Temperature regulating. G gets softer with every wash. I'm not kidding you. All right. Now, so if you go to CozyEarth.com and you enter the code, enter the code Chris, and you can get up to 35 percent off your first order. CozyEarth.com and the code is Chris. is Chris. Professor, I appreciate you being with us. Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. I don't know if you remember, Chris, we actually met out in Montauk. What was I doing? You don't remember. I don't, but you know what? I got long COVID and I've had six concussions. You were eating and drinking and the guy hosting a party came over and introduced us. And I was just, I just signed
Starting point is 00:04:23 with CNN to do a CNN Plus show. So this was like, what, two summers ago? Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, you were with your wife and a big group of fabulous people. And I walked up and you were very friendly and very nice. Everything before I got shit canned is a fog. Then again, everything after I got shit canned is kind of a fog also. That's the defining moment in your life.
Starting point is 00:04:43 Trust me, boss, it's going to happen again. That's the problem. It doesn't sound me boss it's gonna happen again that's the problem it doesn't sound like you ever shook him before once you get shook him several times you develop immunity story i wish that were true uh the the second part i hope it never happens again because i'm um i'm barely figuring this part out this time i want to talk uh macro about a lot of the different things that you put out there, which we're all very impressed by here at the project. My producer, Greg, is a devotee of yours, listens to you multiple times a week.
Starting point is 00:05:12 So you got that going for you. But just in terms of where your head is and my head is, where you are right now in life, what is your biggest concern for you? You know, my biggest concern is that I never get off the hamster wheel of addiction to affirmation from others, that I'm so focused on money. I didn't grow up with a lot of money and I've been so focused on it that even now that I have a decent amount, I'm still too focused on it. So the addiction to other people's affirmation and my
Starting point is 00:05:41 relentless pursuit of money will squeeze out the important things in my life and I'll be old and towards the end and realize I fucked up. That's my biggest fear. And I will match that with, I probably wound up putting myself in the wrong position of being in the, what you call the public affirmation or others affirmation business being in the media
Starting point is 00:06:03 because I'm not set up for it. I'm not set up to want other people's validation. That's why I would never be in politics. And I never understood why my big brother wanted to go into it. I did understand why my father went into it, but he was a different cat. So I put myself in a position where I am not a natural for how people are in my business. So I have such a big dose of go fuck yourself in me, especially right now, that it is a very big struggle for me
Starting point is 00:06:32 to stay doing what I'm doing. And I'm leaning way too hard on my desire to help others. But while that sounds great, it's not great from a self-care perspective because you can't just live your life trying to do the right thing by other people. You know, you wind up in a hole really quick. So that's mine. In terms of we're both parents, when you think about your boys, my boys and girls, what do you wish you could do differently? I don't think there's a user manual on parenting.
Starting point is 00:07:05 My parents took a much different approach to parenting than I did. I worry, I mean, I have a lot of worries about my kids. Generally speaking, my kids have grown up in a world of privilege. And I would say, if I had what my kids have, I wouldn't have what I have. My ambition didn't come from a moral place
Starting point is 00:07:21 of trying to make the world a better place. It didn't come from a great talent that emerged. It came from a lack of things that I wanted. And my life wasn't hard, but I saw that my life could be a lot easier if I had professional and economic security. And that really motivated me. My mom got very sick when I was very young and I didn't have the money to help. And that was very emasculating and humiliating at the time. And so I decided early that I would make the requisite commitment to at least try to have professional success. And it paid off for me. And most of it was luck.
Starting point is 00:07:50 I came into an era of the internet, processing power, unprecedented bull market run. So most of it was not my fault, but I put myself in a position to register that good fortune. And I worry that my kids don't have that motivation because they don't need it. So that's the biggest worry, I think, for my kids. The bigger worry on specifically to my boys is there's something going on biologically with boys maturing later. There's evidence that their prefrontal cortex isn't developing as soon as it used to or they're so far behind women. That society doesn't really value young men. It kind of assumes that they're guilty of something from the get-go, that they're just much more prone to addiction, much more prone to depression. And I worry that it's a difficult world for young men. I would say that's more my macro view.
Starting point is 00:08:38 So trying to figure out a way to instill a sense of grit in a 12 and a 15-year-old that don't necessarily need it. And I think there's some specific, some issues specific to boys that our society is still not really, it's really not come to realize how significant they are. Boy, I think that's gonna have such an echo effect. I hear that all the time. I have a 17 year old variety of the species at home.
Starting point is 00:09:03 And just to match, I wish that I had been less driven, less selfish, and had taken my kids away for big blocks of time to other parts of the world. My greatest advantage in my business is that I grew up in a place that was a true polyglot, really mixed socioeconomic and ethnic area. You can't give that to anybody. It's got to be lived. So my kids don't have that experience. They're way more liberal than where I grew up, but they just have different bases of exposure. And I really wish, I always knew this. I always, I just wish I would have done them right. Now, the reason I like this little exercise is you have such shine on you. People really, not just Greg Ott, who I love dearly and is here five feet away, so I don't want to disrespect him. But so many of my friends, really successful, mostly men, but a few women also,
Starting point is 00:10:12 really need your perspective on things. They see you as almost a unicorn because they don't see you as selling anything. You know, from time to time you have a book or, you know, whatever it is, you got the podcast. don't see you as selling anything. You know, from time to time you have a book or, you know, whatever it is, you got the podcast. But I want people to remember that, you know, you're not some Oracle sitting on a fucking mountain. You know, that a lot of what you mine for people in terms of perspective, no matter how much candor you exercise or practice in your communications, there's a sameness there that I think greatly benefits you as well. So that's why I kind of ask these questions. First off, those are really generous comments. And I get anxious hearing that
Starting point is 00:10:49 because that means I'm due for a fall. And our culture loves to build up people so they can tear them down. And I even see it now that I've reached a certain level of fame and respect in economic success that there's kind of a game or there's virtue points or there's currency in attacking me. And quite frankly, I'm not used to it. People ask you, well, how do you respond to when people attack you? And I'm going to be clear, I fuck up all the time. I get it wrong all the time. And I'd like to say, oh, it rolls right off from me. I try to have perspective. It really upsets me. It really rattles me when someone sees a sense of soft tissue in something I say or in me personally or professionally highlights an inconsistency and Twitter just weighs in and comes after me. It really like it's ruined a couple of my weekends.
Starting point is 00:11:42 where I've really gotten into a hole in the last five or ten years, have been inspired by people sort of coming for me because there's currency and going after people that might be saying something. I'm blessed with economic security and people who love me, and I believe what Sam Harris says, that if you have those things, you have an obligation to say what you think is correct. And I think a lot of my modest success right now comes from, I get it wrong or right, but I'm generally trying to speak with no filter. And you know you're doing something right when you seem to offend everybody.
Starting point is 00:12:12 And it's really strange, though. On Twitter, in our environment, I consider myself a raging moderate. There's no room for moderates because people on the right kind of write you off as, oh, he's just liberal. They just immediately say anything around whatever it might be. I think the universal, I think child tax credit should be restored. Oh, he's a liberal. They sign him off. And then on the left, it's even worse because occasionally if you say something like, I think there's some truth to the notion that the left immediately assigned conspiracy to
Starting point is 00:12:42 the notion that the virus escaped from a lab and started calling people racist when they shouldn't have, when we should have taken it more seriously. They act like they've been betrayed by you. Like, we thought you were one of us. And so there is literally no room anymore for where the majority of America is, and that is to be moderates in the media. You just, there's just no space. You get attacked from both sides. But you saying, it's like I always say to people when you have a big win professionally or economically, bring in your horns because that means you're due for a real base plant. Luck is perfectly symmetrical. And when you should be really aggressive is when something bad happens to
Starting point is 00:13:20 you or you pick a stock that goes down 50% or you get fired because that means you're due for something good. Most luck kind of goes around, comes around. But yeah, I'm really enjoying this moment. I feel like I'm rounding third. I'm trying to have a positive influence. I'm trying to just be totally unfiltered and fearless. And it costs me money sometimes, but it also gets me money because people hire me to come do stuff. But anyways, I'll finish where I began. I appreciate your comments. Those are nice to hear. So a a couple questions, and then we'll dive in to what you just put on the table there. First one is, you really believe in luck, and you don't think that it's just chance and preparation meets opportunity? Oh, God, no. Look at me, Chris. Here's my narrative pre-40. I overcame the obstacles. I'm the son of a single immigrant mother that lived and died a secretary. Check my shit out.
Starting point is 00:14:13 My household was never more than $40,000. Mother stricken with illness early. Had to come to my graduate school. Wanted to get a PhD, got an MBA, and I overcame all of this to just be this fucking awesome. Check my shit out. That was my narrative pre-40. And then what happens as you get older, the good news is you become more aware. The bad news is you become more aware. And what I realized is that as a white heterosexual male born in 1964, what did I have? Access to free education that was accessible. I went to UCLA and Berkeley for a total tuition, all seven years, of $7,000. I got in. I was an unremarkable kid. I didn't get good grades, but I didn't test well either. And UCLA had a 76% admissions rate in 1982 when I applied. 76% admissions. And I was one of the 24% that didn't get in. I had to apply
Starting point is 00:15:06 twice and I got in. I would never get in today. I graduated with a 2.27 GPA. The only thing I learned at UCLA was how to make bongs out of common household items. So what does Berkeley do? Berkeley lets me into graduate school. I get out of Berkeley in 1992 just as processing power and the web comes along. I have a good rap. I'm a talented guy, and I shave my head. I could raise tens of millions of dollars for stupid companies, the majority of which failed. All I needed was a couple wins. And I mean, the win has been so – and then I took that capital and put it into the market in companies like Amazon and Apple. And we had an unprecedented historic run in the markets.
Starting point is 00:15:46 And I'm not modest. I think I'm ridiculously talented. I think I'm a top one percenter. But top one percent globally means you're in a room the size of the population of Germany. And I have a much better life than 75 million other people. And the example I always use, my freshman roommate in the fraternity at UCLA was a kid named Pat Jarvis. And we were very similar, both talented, both from fairly humble economic beginnings. And I go on to have this life. I'm here with you now. Pat's dead of AIDS at 33, you know, because God reached into his soul and flipped on a switch that decided he was homosexual, not heterosexual.
Starting point is 00:16:24 I hit the fucking lottery on nine different dimensions. And part of getting older is you start to realize if you live in America, if you've had access to education, if you have a good partner, if you have economic security, you're literally in the top 0.0001% of good fortune of people who have roamed this earth. So I have no delusions now. I am remarkably talented. I am remarkably hardworking, and I am ridiculously fucking lucky. That was a rant. No, not at all. And I don't disagree with your analysis, first of all, because it's obviously by definition subjective, and it's what you want it to be, which is a huge principle in my life that I practice on a regular basis. So much of our realities are what we decide of them circumstantially.
Starting point is 00:17:13 I guess the reason I don't believe in luck is because of how believing in luck plays out badly in two ways for me. One, it means the way it's used too often is to put someone like you down. Like you say, you're rounding third. The pejorative is, yeah, you were born on third. Now, that's not true about you, but they'll make it true anyway, especially as we move left to the political spectrum or right to the political spectrum because the two fringes are way more similar than they want to believe, which is, well, you're a white male. So there you go. To me, this is about circumstance. It's about chance. And it's about fortune. And a fortune is not an
Starting point is 00:17:56 analog for luck. And I don't like to see people who come from your circumstances where, well, then I guess he wasn't lucky because there are a lot of people who overcome circumstance. So I like to see it also as more complex than that. And your life and situation certainly is demonstrative of this because it gives more credit to how much we have to work on and what will make a difference. The other question I have before I dive into your statement, I believe, which is a very good template for our dynamic in our society right now and why I'm a fan of the book Adrift that you recently came out with is this. Who do you spend your time with? When you're not on the grind, who's in your foxhole?
Starting point is 00:18:40 That's an interesting question. I have a posse of close friends from college and through work. I like to go out. I like to drink. I always say I work out a lot and I try and eat well so I can drink and enjoy THC and substances and I do it with other people. I'm going out tonight. I'm in London. I'm going to dinner with eight people. Saturday night, me and some friends for a birthday party rented out the box which is this crazy vaudeville thing here i like to go out i like nightlife i hang out with friends i meet a lot of really interesting people professionally and i try and take advantage of that i'm a fairly social person so i go out a lot at night and then during the day the thing i love about covid or that was great about covid for me was i spent a lot of time at home so when my kids come home i can just kind of hang out with them but it's basically like boys and friends is how I would say who I hang out with. It's really important. The more, you know, the older I am, we're basically the same age. Different stages, but basically same age.
Starting point is 00:19:38 Is that if you're going to be in the media and you want to be helpful to people, you better not hang out with people in the media because you are going to lose touch really fast. I don't care how much money they have. And it's not even about like quotidian travails or anything like that. It's just about what's front of mind. I'm really lucky, to use your word, that I have a lot of people in my life who have no interest in what you and i do now you you do something very different than i but just the idea of listening to podcasts or watching tv for information is like fifth on their list of how they would want
Starting point is 00:20:19 to spend non-work time and they have been such an invaluable resource to me one when i got shit canned um because your fancy friends you know they they take off in those situations and not just because they're bad people or the friendships were false i'm not saying that at all but it's so contagious you know oh you still talking to galloway really after that shit that went down you're still hanging with him and all of a sudden, someone calls you and says, hey, I'm with the Washington Post or I'm with, you know,
Starting point is 00:20:49 Dick Feed News and you're friends with Scott Galloway, so you're okay that he ran over that baby rhino? You know, and well, no, I'm very against running over baby rhinos. I just made a contribution right now. So I understood the dynamic.
Starting point is 00:21:09 But I have a bunch of men and women in my life who have known me for so long. I remember one female friend said to me, wow, if I thought that you were going to go down, it was never going to be for any of this shit. You've done a lot worse than what they just took you down for. That was very healthy for me. It was very helpful for me to kind of remember how people see people who are in the public eye. So who you have in your life is really, really important,
Starting point is 00:21:38 not just in terms of whatever your grind is, but in terms of what you're going to make of yourself and what you're going to give back. Now, what you're talking about with your boys and your concern about them and a little bit of what's going on in our society, I think we can weave together into why I found your book Adrift so helpful
Starting point is 00:21:55 without looking at it through, and I love the pitch for people who haven't gotten it yet, and I'm sure you will if you're listening to this podcast. There's a great quantitative assessment of what is fundamentally qualitative as an assessment of the why. The why is going to be subjective in this situation, but there's a lot of quantitative data that the professor uses to help explain it. I didn't need the quantitative because the qualitative is real enough for me in looking at us right now. the qualitative is real enough for me in looking at us right now. The reason that they want you to go down is because that's where the currency is in our culture right now, Scott. It's great to have people like you who have great insight, straight talk. How did Greg describe it? He's
Starting point is 00:22:39 profane in a good way, he said, which already shows that somebody's trying to do you a favor. Galloway, he said, which already shows that somebody's trying to do you a favor. There is no upside to me doing a piece about Scott Galloway, about how great he is. I was reading some of your clips, even this journal piece that was out there about Scott Galloway wants to be the biggest thinker in business or whatever it was. And it was a nice headline as headlines go. And I read the piece and I was then thinking of myself as I was prepping, I guarantee he never described himself that way. But that's the idea is that they have to inflate you because negativity is a proxy for insight. And I think that that is so dominant in our cultural space right now. The reason the left rejects you is that they are in an existential fight
Starting point is 00:23:26 against what they believe is a tyrannical force. And the reason that the right has to dismiss you is because they believe they are in an existential battle with a tyrannical force. And the parties have been reduced to magnified minorities. Like the Democratic Party, my father wouldn't recognize it. He wouldn't recognize what's on their agenda, why. He wouldn't even recognize Joe Biden. And he knew Biden for a really long time. And that's the reality. I don't know that we're adrift. When
Starting point is 00:24:03 I was reading the book, I was thinking about it. It works well, everything in it. I really do recommend it highly. I've bought several copies of it for people. We're not adrift. We have made a choice to head ourselves towards the rocks because our society is somehow convinced that only in extremists can things be valued. is somehow convinced that only in extremists can things be valued. Everybody has to have a hard luck story. Everybody has to be hard. Everybody has to want to kill their enemies. And I don't know what the antidote is for us, except for, unfortunately, mass catastrophe. 9-11 was the only break we've had from this in the 70s. I agree with everything you said, but I try to figure out what is the context for that? What is the environment that's led to that?
Starting point is 00:24:52 And I think that if you think about any time you transition or arbitrage one substance, one material to another for economic gain, there's externalities. So you take fossil fuels to turn them into petroleum. Unbelievable upside, by the way. You wouldn't have hospitals without fossil fuels. It's literally turned us into a moderate society. Unbelievable prosperity. But there are emissions, and we're very cognizant of those emissions and hopefully trying to address them, maybe not as quickly as we should be. If you turn plant-based calories into beef-based calories, you have externalities. You have methane, you have deforestation.
Starting point is 00:25:28 When someone figured out you could turn attention into Nissan ads and into dollars, they trained the algorithms not to service you, but to try and figure out how to maintain your attention. And we went very ugly places. It resulted in attention that makes you feel worse about yourself. So we have an explosion in teen depression, especially among girls. It tries to figure out, oh, one way to really satisfy you and get you to dial in all the time
Starting point is 00:25:50 is to make fun of the other side and tickle your sensors with rage. It's to, on a regular basis, give you a healthy dose of negative feedback, which makes you addicted to the positive feedback and very sensitive to the platform because you're getting negative feedback. So what do we have? We have teen depression. We have massive polarization. I mean, we never used to speak to each other this way.
Starting point is 00:26:12 We have weaponization of our elections. And it's all because of what I believe. People would argue, what's the most dangerous emission or externality of transitioning one good to the other? They would say, OK, fossil fuels to petroleum carbon. I actually believe that if we can reduce carbon emissions by 40% in America, that we're doing better on carbon emissions than the emissions from the rage that these algorithms are creating. Would it even be possible right now in the media to figure out a way to take the temperature, the polarization, the teen depression, the self-hate down 40%? Because if you look at America, to your point about us not being adrift,
Starting point is 00:26:47 you could make an argument that a sober look at the data, America geopolitically is relatively speaking, never been stronger. No one was lining up for Chinese or American vaccines. We've sort of eliminated child poverty, not totally, but we brought it down dramatically. We have the best and brightest all want to come here our gdp growth has been consistent you know we had took a huge toll with covid but we handled
Starting point is 00:27:11 it less bad than anybody our inflation is less bad than anywhere in the world and we're growing our economy so when people shit post america i'm like where where would you point to is doing nearly as well as us on almost any we have huge problems with systemic racism racism who's come further faster than us on that issue we have huge problems with gender in the workplace who's come further faster than us that has this heterogeneous society and yet we don't like each other no we can't share in our achievements we can't join hands and saying isn't it fucking awesome to be American? Right? I mean, we don't even see each other as Americans. We see each other as red and blue, or as we want to categorize each other. We cut off 50% of relationships. 44% of parents are
Starting point is 00:27:56 worried, Democratic parents are worried their kid's going to marry a Republican. And I always go back to World War II, and I have this great colorized image in my living room of these young men, average age 26, average wage $800, inflation-adjusted basis. There's GIs. They get off a landing craft. They're wading through 48-degree water, thinking about what waits for them on Omaha Beach, where two of three of them wouldn't leave the beach alive. I can't imagine a single one of them had any idea who was a republican or a democrat next to them all they knew was we're americans and we got a big job and if we survive this we're going to be grateful the rest of their lives and i imagine
Starting point is 00:28:35 in some sort of suspension of the time space continuum they can turn around and they can see us and they can be like what You're worrying about that shit? Do you realize? And if they had a glimpse into our lives and our prosperity and our freedoms, they would be so disappointed that we're this disappointed. So I really feel like we've lost the script, that our perspective is totally warped and has been disarticulated from the amazing things about America. I hear you and I feel you. I have somewhat, it's not like it used to be. I used to really feel that my work was going to make a difference in the media.
Starting point is 00:29:23 Well, I'm not just the number one show at CNN, but I am actually, I talk to, I'm the only people who have Trump people on, and I talk to them, and I go after these things. We go all over the world, and when I'm in Africa and Europe, they know us from CNN. It's good. This is good. circumstance, but because I just think that people in America specifically are so insistent on negative comparisons and who is worse. And I really do trace a lot of it back to our party system. And I'm not saying that the parties are equal, but it also doesn't matter because the dynamic itself is toxic. And this is not anything to do with my own brain. George Washington worked with Madison and Hamilton on his farewell address, right?
Starting point is 00:30:06 He wanted to give it the first time they made him be president again. And the reason he decided to be president again was because he hated what was going on with the party manipulation that boxed out Jefferson in this fight with Hamilton. So then he winds up giving the farewell address, which Hamilton finished off for him. And one of his key points, actually, three of his five points are the same. Don't bring the country up into regions, sectarian. Be careful about factions where you have groups, whether they're commercial or cultural, lining up one another. And you really have to get away from these parties.
Starting point is 00:30:34 You're going to wind up as bad as our progenitors were over in England. So three of the five points were basically the same, which is don't have groups. Just be a nation. That is all uh was his tagline and we haven't listened to that teddy roosevelt and others have said it through time and now we are in a really really ugly uh zero sum uh battle between two parties where the only thing that matters is who is worse people are shocked that kellyanne Conway comes out on Fox and says, yes, the media has been lying to you, and they have been doing it just to hurt a politician. But it's not Fox. It's the other
Starting point is 00:31:14 ones who are trying to destroy Donald Trump through his entire term. And everyone who watches Fox News will say, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And are they right? Yes, they are right. Why? Because they want to believe that any negative coverage about Donald Trump was done to destroy him. And there was plenty of negative coverage about Donald Trump. I do a ton of it. And I stand by every single part of it. But that doesn't mean that what Fox is doing isn't wrong. No, not part of the analysis. Well, Biden is not on his game. Let's be honest. Yes, he is.
Starting point is 00:31:51 Who would you want? Trump? You know, as if instead of Trump, you're saying, you know, Attila the Hun or Nero, you know, near the end of his life or something like that. Well, no, but Biden's just not on his game. You know, I've known Joe Biden most of my life. This ain't him at his best. I'm just telling you. And how should he be? He's, you know, 80 years old or whatever. of my life. This ain't him at his best. I'm just telling you. And how should he be?
Starting point is 00:32:07 He's, you know, 80 years old or whatever. Don't say that. Don't say it. It's zero sum, which is worse. And it is bleeding into the rest of culture, which is supercharged by social media, which is, you know, a place that, well, a resource that we really haven't figured out. But in the media, it's worst of all. You're saving grace. I do believe in grace, by the way. I may, you're saving grace. I do believe in grace,
Starting point is 00:32:25 by the way. I may not believe in luck, but I do believe in grace. And I'm a huge beneficiary of it. Is that you're not really in the media. Had the CNN Plus thing kept going, and I thought it was very regrettable that it didn't. I'm not a hater of CNN. I don't like how my time ended. I shouldn't have been fired for the reasons that I was, but I'm litigating. CNN is an amazing organization, and I love many of the people there. But had you stayed in it until now, you would really be a fully minted member of the media, and then there would be a much longer set of knives coming. Well, I'm blessed in the sense that one of my mentors
Starting point is 00:32:59 is a guy named Jeff Bugis who ran Time Warner, and he said that the reason why media works for you and media is receptive to you is that, I don't want to say I don't need it, but that's not what I do. I get my economic security elsewhere. I go on anchors. I don't go on networks. I like Neil Cavuto at Fox. If Neil invites me on, I'll go on. I like Stephanie Ruhl, so I'll go on MSNBC. I go with people I think will do a good job and have a good conversation with. You are correct in your analysis.
Starting point is 00:33:28 It's easier for me to say, I mean, I've always been a little bit of an outsider and someone who was always attacked by the media anyway. But it's easier for me to say I'm a Scott, Professor Scott, you know, fan because you're not really in the same business as me. If you were sitting at eight o'clock on Newsmax and I'm at eight o'clock at News Nation, you're probably not going to hear that from me the same way. Why? Because I'm jealous. Because I need you to do badly. No one's threatened by me. I want to make an observation though, and it's something I've just come to recognize just listening to you. So my colleague Adam Alter at the business school has done great work around end of life. Like, what are people's biggest regrets?
Starting point is 00:34:15 He's interviewed a ton of people, and they regret that they lived the life that they wanted to live, not what their parents wanted, that they'd been more open about their sexuality or gone into a profession they'd wanted to be in. They wish they'd stayed in better touch with their friends, maintained relationships. But more than anything, they wish they had been less hard on themselves. And I see that in you, Chris, and I would love to have a bet with you and timestamp it for 20 or 30 years. This situation that just went down with you, the thing you're going to regret, the thing you're going to be angriest about is not what happened to you, but how much you let it upset you. Because I'm telling you, Chris, the biggest lesson in life is that nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems. And you're going to look back on this whole era and your biggest regret is going to be how much
Starting point is 00:34:59 you beat yourself up over it and how upset you were. Because this is meaningful what's happened to you. it's not profound i would like that to be true by the way all of it especially the 20 to 30 year part because i really do believe that this has sucked a lot of life force out of me but just to be very clear it's not just the ego bash of losing my identity okay i never really processed it that way, but I will acknowledge now with the benefit of a lot of therapy and people saying,
Starting point is 00:35:30 yes, you did to me in my life, that, okay, I overstated who I was because of what I did and where. Okay, I accept that. I allowed that to be too important to me in my sense of self. Okay, that is still third on the me in my sense of self. Okay. That is still third on the list of what I'm reeling from, just so you can understand.
Starting point is 00:35:56 And I am a little bit of a poor man's you and as much as even more of a poor man's you now that I got to pay out settlements every five minutes to people who want to come after me. But I am also very honest about myself. That is the biggest positive change in this situation in terms of what I do with my platform. I never talked about my life or my struggles for two reasons. One, it would just be fodder for my enemies who use it all the time now to attack me.
Starting point is 00:36:18 But also that people would be like, fuck you with your petty fucking problems when I'm sitting here with my kid who has cancer and my other, you know, people have such more profound problems that i didn't want to trivialize theirs by giving them a point of comparison to me so i never did it now i do it all the time because i believe it's probably the best thing that i can do for people um i know what it's like i've been fired before i was you. I was a shitty construction guy. I was a shitty gas station guy.
Starting point is 00:36:47 I mean, I've been fired from other jobs. But I didn't get the biggest job I was ever up for, which was anchor of GMA. And I screwed that up myself. I'm happy with who they went with. They went with George Stephanopoulos, whom I love and adore as a guy. I'm happy for him.
Starting point is 00:37:02 But I know disappointment. But this hit on a lot of layers. The most important ones to me were I let my family down. How do you think you let your family down? I let my family down in two ways. And this is, you know, people are going to pick this up. They're going to write about it. I don't give a fuck.
Starting point is 00:37:20 Andrew's going to get upset. I don't give a fuck about that either. I love him, but he'll understand. Our father passed and reading about your mom, what you did was so great, by the way, making the decision to move in with your mom, help honor her wishes about her end of life and what you learned about her
Starting point is 00:37:38 and about yourself and about life. What a beautiful example for you to put out there for people like me. So thank you so much for sharing that. And it was really a catalyst for me to want to share more because I was like, wow, this makes me cry thinking about it. So Pop was everything in our family, okay? Yep, yep. The best people in my family are the women.
Starting point is 00:37:59 Pop would say it all the time. My mother is, you know, literally love incarnate. all the time. My mother is, you know, literally love incarnate. My three sisters are wildly successful and secure enough in themselves where they don't have to be in the media or in politics for people to tell them how good they are. So there's no question that anyone who's being honest will say the best people with Cuomo's name are the females. And the best person in my family without a question is my sister, Maria. Everybody in the family will say it, if they're being honest, to their therapist.
Starting point is 00:38:28 The point was this. My father's dying. He is not himself, which was, really made me question my faith more than any of the other horrible things I've seen in my life. Because this is a guy I really believe,
Starting point is 00:38:42 dedicated his life to it, did not really care about the corporeal or the physical or in any real way. He was all about his mind and his thinking. And that's what he lost. And it was horrible to see, horrible, horrible. And one thing that was so important to him that he kept repeating almost too much
Starting point is 00:39:01 because he got locked in that sundowner syndrome was be there for your family and specifically to me and for Andrew also be there for your mother and your brother. Um, you know, my, my brother raised me, my father was in politics. He was gone. You know, he, we got, he got into politics when I was like six or seven. He was never really home after that. Andrew literally taught me just about everything I knew growing up. So it means everything to me to be there for my family, especially my brother. And the irony to me is you got fired because you helped your brother too much. No, I didn't help my brother enough because in my mind i believe there was a
Starting point is 00:39:48 way to deal with what was happening to him and why it was happening to him uh personally professionally that i didn't recognize in time and i could have helped with it not by destroying his accusers or anything malevolent like that. Anybody who knows me knows I would never do anything like, but I didn't help him. I didn't save him. So I failed. And in doing that, Scott, I had no idea
Starting point is 00:40:15 how much shit I was putting on my wife and kids. I don't know how I didn't see this. I really don't. I mean, I grew up like that. I grew up as somebody who was angry at daddy for putting his shit on me that now I had to be Mario's son. So I was so aware of the dynamic of this derivative derision, let's call it. And then I did it. And my son had to fight fights that weren't his to fight. And my daughter had to defend things that were not hers to defend,
Starting point is 00:40:45 the little one and the big one. And my wife, who was like, you know, one of the more progressive and talented women, you know, that will, as a marker of our generation, and all this got put on her and her business. So that is what's killing me. It's not, I lost my job at CNN. You know, it's not, oh, look at all these headlines that say,
Starting point is 00:41:06 you know, I like to do inappropriate things. I'm okay with that. I know who I am. I've got a real dose of self-loathing. So it takes a lot for people to get to me because I'm getting to myself. But those are the things that haunt me, brother. Those are the things that haunt me. We don't fake the funk here.
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Starting point is 00:42:43 Restrictions apply. You see the website, you'll get details and important safety information. You're going to need a subscription. It's required. Plus, price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. We don't fake the funk here. And here's the real talk.
Starting point is 00:42:59 Over 40 years of age, 52% of us experience some kind of ED between the ages of 40 and 70. I know it's taboo, it's embarrassing, but it shouldn't be. Thankfully, we now have HIMS, and it's changing the vibe by providing affordable access to ED treatment, and it's all online. HIMS is changing men's health care. Why? Because it's giving you access to affordable and discreet sexual health treatments. And you do it right from your couch. HIMS provides access to clinically proven generic alternatives to Viagra or Cialis or whatever.
Starting point is 00:43:37 And it's up to like 95% cheaper. And there are options as low as two bucks a dose. HIMS has hundreds of thousands of trusted subscribers. So if ED is getting you down, it's time to pick it up. Start your free online visit today at HIMS.com slash CCP. H-I-M-S dot com slash CCP. And you will get personalized ED treatment options. hyms.com slash ccp.
Starting point is 00:44:10 Prescriptions, you need an online consultation with a healthcare provider. And they will determine if appropriate. Restrictions apply. You see the website. You'll get details and important safety information. You're going to need a subscription. It's required. Plus, price is going to vary based
Starting point is 00:44:25 on product and subscription plan. I do think you're being a little bit hard on yourself. So when your father's famous and talented and is having an impact, it comes with a lot of upside and a lot of downside. My 12-year-old came home really disappointed. And I said, what's up? And he said, why does Elon Musk hate you? It got back to him that Elon Musk was insulting me on Twitter. And it really upset him. Because I think I'm a 12-year-old guy who sends rockets into space and made the car we own. And the fact that other kids were making fun of his dad,
Starting point is 00:45:01 because Elon Musk called me some names on Twitter. It was hurtful. You have experienced that times a thousand, but here's the thing. My guess is you've been an extraordinary provider. My guess is for every one difficult moment that your kids or your wife has had to endure, they've had dozens of amazing opportunities because their dad and their husband is so talented. And also, with respect to your brother, you're just being a little bit of a martyr. From an outsider, it looks like you try to help your brother to a fault. And I would say to you just at the end of the day at a very crude level, you fucked up. You said you were sorry. Next, move on. Everyone else has moved on i mean the thing that
Starting point is 00:45:47 should give you comfort and gives me comfort i beat myself up so much i said the most ridiculously stupid thing on a board meeting the other day and i'm supposed to be the independent director who comes with this wisdom and i made this comment thinking it was funny and it fell flat and it just made everyone feel like shit in the room. And I'm beating myself up. And what I try to remember is the moment after I said it, everyone went, oh, that was a stupid thing to say. And then they went back to thinking about themselves. They went back to thinking about themselves. And here's the thing, you said something and I'll give you a different view of looking at stuff through a different lens that your father's illness made you question your faith. I get a lot of faith from my non-faith. I'm a rabid atheist. I believe that I'm going to look into
Starting point is 00:46:29 my kid's eyes at some point and know our relationship is coming to an end. And it gives me in a different way a lot of strength because I don't think this is a dress rehearsal. And a lot of times when I get upset and I get down or I get angry at someone because of a perceived slight, I think to myself, you know, I don't have time for this shit. I'm going to be dead soon. I need to get back to the important business of loving other people, trying to go for it, not being afraid of risk, not living in fear, not caring what Twitter thinks of me. But you are definitely, you're being too hard on yourself.
Starting point is 00:46:59 I mean, at the end of the day, decide if you're screwed up or not, decide what you can learn from it, and move on. And this notion that your family somehow, that you let them down, I don't see any evidence of that. And they are in this with a famous person that comes with a lot of benefits and a lot of drawbacks. It sucks to be a grown-up. Your kids didn't choose it. I feel bad for them. But my guess is they've gotten a lot of amazing opportunities because daddy's a baller. I would like to adopt that belief. I would certainly say it to others if I deemed it accurate. But you know how it is, man.
Starting point is 00:47:34 The struggle, all pain is personal. If life were a written test, I'd probably get somewhere around a 98 or 99. And that's only because I would find some of the questions to be silly and fuck with the answer on purpose. But the practical exam is a killer. And there is also no question in my mind is another thing that I talk about. And it's another thing that certain people in my life wish I wouldn't.
Starting point is 00:47:58 I also think it's part of the key to helping young men because I'll tell you what's really destructive right now is, and we started using a lot in this Idaho college campus murder story. And Greg's going to hate that I'm asking, but he's married, so it's okay. What do you call the guys that I'm thinking about? The, they're like intentionally incel. Incels? Yeah, Greg's like, why are you asking me?
Starting point is 00:48:23 He's mortified. It's okay. I'm not saying- You're looking at him. I avoid him. It was just a young person's question. The incel thing is very frightening to me, and here's why. It is quantifying and giving a type to something that we should be doing everything we can to help not exist. And one of the keys to it that has been an over-adjustment in our society right now, but only in certain portions, nobody talks about fragility, struggle, and pain except in a relative way. And I really thought about this recently with the Dilbert guy. So the Dilbert
Starting point is 00:49:03 guy does something that he had to know was gonna have a bucket of shit dumped on his head just judging by his artistic work he's a smart guy um yeah i doubt and then so he gets canceled a hundred different ways for saying white people should run away from black people all right or however he said it and he was set up by a bad poll uh we would never use in any media agency i've ever been part of a rasmussen poll uh they are very often geared uh for a specific outcome you can say that about all polling i know but it's a matter of degree but he said what he said here Here's my problem. I hear what he has said from non-bigoted white people all the time, not run away from black people. Like I said, I have a very mixed crew.
Starting point is 00:49:57 I don't have a person in my life who has a problem with any kind of diversity. They're not going to be in my life. It doesn't work for me personally. I hear white people, specifically white men, saying that they feel like they are being targeted all the time. They won't say it out loud. They'll not come on my podcast if they want to keep their job, but they feel it. And I feel that there was such an opportunity there, just as I do with young men about what their place is um to get back into a robert bligh kind of iron john kind of understanding of ritual and uh culture and tradition and value and worth that we can't talk about in any way because we don't care enough about each other and speak to the fragility of it. And the left doesn't want to
Starting point is 00:50:45 have this conversation, but it's killing them. The reason Donald Trump worked as well as he did, one of the reasons, is not just because he was an agent for People's Animus. White people do feel that their kids who do well in high school and are good in sports and do stuff for their community are at a disadvantage to minority kids who don't check any of the same boxes as them. But they don't say it because they're afraid that they'll be called racist. And I think it's a real problem, and I think it's hurting the left, and they don't even know it, apparently,
Starting point is 00:51:17 because they're allowing people within their space to condemn that kind of thinking as, oh, poor you, life is getting fair all of a sudden because the people I'm talking about don't see it as fair. No, it's not fair. My kid's got a 93 in high school. He or she got 1,300 on their SATs, plays three different sports, and sells a shit ton of Girl Scout cookies.
Starting point is 00:51:41 She's not going to get into Syracuse and your kid is because they're puerto rican they feel that and you can certainly see it in data as well if you want we can't talk about it this guy says what he says he gets canceled i'm not surprised he got canceled i'm not even saying it's wrong given the cultural mores that we're observing but what a missed conversation chance what am i getting wrong? Well, so there's a lot there. So in reverse order with Scott Adams, I think the guy's a genius.
Starting point is 00:52:11 I've been reading Dilbert since I was a kid. There's more than just racism or bigotry there. That guy is self-destructive. He was consistently making comments to try and push the line and find out where the line was. He said mean, weird things, supporting Kanye. I just think there's something off with Scott. And I think the media's obsession with it is a bit unproductive.
Starting point is 00:52:32 This is somebody who just says stupid things. I don't even think he's racist. I just think he's stupid and he's got a self-destructive bent. And finally, he went too far and people have said, that's it, you're out. The larger point around, I think a lot about young men. And the way you bring the temperature down and have a more thoughtful conversation is in data. Because it's just harder to argue with. Young men are three times as likely to be addicted to a substance.
Starting point is 00:53:01 They're four times as likely to kill themselves. They're 12 times as likely to be incarcerated. They are more single women who own homes than men now. Seven in 10 high school valedictorians are girls. In the next five years, there's going to be two female college graduates for every one male college graduate. And you think, okay, well, maybe I'm going to ignore all that. And women will say, or people of color will say, well, your hair's on fire now. Where were you for us? And I would argue, you know what? When it was 40, 60 female to male in colleges, we were there for you. We had affirmative action. When only 2% of college students were African-American, we tried to level up people of color and we did a decent job of it. And by the way, those were enormous victories.
Starting point is 00:53:40 And the progress that women are making should be celebrated. To be pro-male or to be advocating for young men is not a zero-sum game. Civil rights didn't hurt white people. Being pro-marriage or pro-gay marriage doesn't cost heteronormative marriages anything. So to be pro-man does not necessarily mean that you're being anti-women. And unfortunately, on TikTok, there's a lot of guys claiming to be pro-man that are just kind of thinly veiled misogynists. But when you look at the knock-on effects here, if we don't have household formation, what Chris Williams describes as perfectly, he calls it the high heels effect. Over the last 30 years, women have been growing, growing economically, emotionally, societally, and men have been shrinking. And 50% of women say they will not
Starting point is 00:54:25 date someone shorter than them. Women mate socioeconomically horizontally and up, men horizontally and down. And so female college graduates aren't interested in dating a guy who didn't go to college. So you've had women getting taller and men getting shorter. So we've all heard this story of, well, I have a ton of great single friends, female friends, who can't find a date. No, they can't. They can't find anyone they would want to date. Because we are producing the most dangerous person in the world at scale right now. And that is a broke, lonely, young man who is not attaching to school, not attaching to friends, not attaching to romantic relationships, not attaching to work.
Starting point is 00:55:01 And those individuals make society the most unstable. QAnon members, mass shooters, all shooters all look smell and feel the same they're young men that have been socially exiled don't have their shit together immature go on tinder get absolutely 100 confirmation that they have no value with the other sex they start resenting the other sex and this is when they really jump the shark and know they've lost the script. They start blaming women. They're more prone to misogyny. They're less likely to believe in climate change. In some, they become shitty citizens. And our society, without addressing this issue, even the way we talk about young men, when we talk about problems affecting our communities of color, when we talk about
Starting point is 00:55:42 problems affecting women, we talk about it as a societal wrong, that society needs to address this issue. We need to come together to address these issues, and it's wonderful the progress we make. When we talk about young men struggling, we use terms like accountability, where they need to level up. We start talking about their problem as an individual. We don't want to believe, well, maybe young men are having a more difficult time, because an 18-year-old whose prefrontal cortex is less mature than an 18-year-old girl, basically an 18-year-old girl applying to college is competing against a 16-year-old when she's competing against an 18-year-old male. When we've offshored all of our manufacturing jobs and someone without a college degree can't
Starting point is 00:56:21 get a good job, when we're in a society where women get to apply their filters online, where one and two relationships begin, and they show 80% of their attention to just 20% of the males, we're creating a world of lost men. And these are violent, strange, shitty citizens. And I want to be clear, no one has an obligation to service anyone sexually. No one should date anyone they don't. No one has an obligation to have kids. But we are should date anyone they don't. No one has an obligation to have kids.
Starting point is 00:56:45 But we are going into population decline. Households aren't forming. And the elemental foundation of happiness, much less in a society, is healthy, loving relationships. And we aren't giving men the education, the opportunities, and the on-ramp such that they can be part of that healthy relationship, such that they can form households. be part of that healthy relationship such that they can form households. Do you realize by the turn of the century in America, Chris, we're going to have eight times as many people over the age of 60 and half as many kids under the age of five. So nursery schools are going to become like zoos where we have seniors staring through fences at these creatures they don't see in the wild called children. And when society is going to population decline, their economy goes into decline.
Starting point is 00:57:24 And you end up, I mean, America is going to begin to look like switching channels back and forth between the golden girls and the land of the dead. Is that the society we want? Young people are more creative. Let me be ageist. Young people are more creative. There's a reason they're all at the Grammys. The majority of PhDs in economics are awarded to people based on the work they did as PhD
Starting point is 00:57:43 students. They think really crazy ideas. They did as PhD students. They think really crazy ideas. They make for better artists. They make for better innovators. Most great inventions are kind of thought up to people in their 20s. And we're just losing them because we can't create a context for young men to be successful enough to be appealing to women and have healthy, productive, romantic relationships. It's a huge huge problem and the moment you start talking about it young men some young men get angry because like you're calling me an incel don't you know you're being disparaging to me but a lot of young men are receptive to it a lot of
Starting point is 00:58:14 young women find it offensive because when they hear this type of language they're used to someone driving in a bugatti and saying you need to own that bitch and not let her go to a club. There is a lot of misogyny masquerading as being pro-male. But the people I hear from the most, hands down, who are most supportive of this whole issue, is one cohort and one cohort only, and that's mothers. And it goes something like this. I have two daughters and a son. One daughter's a pen, the other daughter's working in a PR firm in Chicago,
Starting point is 00:58:43 and my son is in the basement vaping and playing video games. If we don't have an honest conversation around young men failing and mating dynamics, true mating dynamics, women have different criteria than men. 25% of men say that economic viability is important. Women say 75% of women say economic viability. So if we're going to create a cohort of economically and emotionally unviable men in America, we are going to have an increasingly unstable society. So address this. The main reason not to believe that if you want to ignore data or look at the data and say, yeah, but it's still on them is, but this world is run by men.
Starting point is 00:59:29 them is, but this world is run by men. So how is it that men like you and me are ruining it for young men? Because we're the ones in power. We should be the ones who want to help them most of all. Sure, women are in power, but not the way men are. So why would this be this way when it's men who are in power? Shouldn't you be caring about other men? I think, well, there's a few things. One, only 24% of our elected officials are women. We're still a fairly sexist society. There's been more women graduating from college for 40 years than men. College is kind of 98% of our elected representatives have a college degree.
Starting point is 00:59:55 We're still sort of bottom line sexist when it comes to leadership positions. Show me a 6'2 guy that has 110 IQ and good hair. Hello, Senator. Show me a 5'2 woman who's 140 IQ and brilliant. Hello, president of school board. The depth of voice and height still kind of people conflate with leadership qualities. That's just true. I would say the labor force is still biased against women, but the educational force is very much biased against men. On a behavior adjusted basis, a boy is twice as likely to be suspended. A black boy five times as likely to be suspended as a girl for the exact same infraction.
Starting point is 01:00:27 So they end up not going to college, they don't have a job, and they end up going down a rabbit hole that we talked about previously. But I absolutely think it's incumbent among our leaders to take more of an active role. But what you have with leaders is most of them are there to get elected to the next highest office. And the way they do that is by getting the most votes. And the people who vote in primary elections are generally the ones who are older. And look at president. Look at the race for president. It starts in states that are the oldest and widest states in the union.
Starting point is 01:00:56 Look who votes, old people. So what do you know? With the child tax credit doesn't make its way into the infrastructure bill, gets stripped out. But seniors are about to get their greatest cost of living adjustment in history and social security. 40% of all government spending goes to the support of seniors. It's going to go to over half in the next decade or two. We don't invest in young people. The greatest innovation in history, it's not the microchip or the phone, it's the middle class. It's an accident. A small number
Starting point is 01:01:22 of men getting a disproportionate amount of the mating opportunities has been true for most of history. But when we brought 7 million men back from the service in 1945, we decided, let's level them up. Let's give them the GI Bill, and we took education and college from 5% to 25%. Let's give them great manufacturing jobs. Let's let them make a living wage. And quite frankly, we produced tens of millions of men who were attractive to women and could come together, build families, and build the best innovation in history. And that's the middle class who pays the bulk of our taxes, funds incredible technology, whether it's NASA or GPS or DARPA, fights our wars. This was the innovation. But to think that it's self-sustaining just isn't true.
Starting point is 01:02:02 At that time, the top tax rate was 91%. At that time, Eisenhower passed the National Highway Act that spent $500 billion to create incredible middle-class jobs. If we don't figure out a way to create a base of prosperity for young men and on-ramps, and by the way, it's not a zero-sum game. I want to see more freshman seats so we can have more women and men of color and have my colleagues get out of this rejectionist luxury bullshit culture of reducing freshman seats so we feel important about ourselves. We're public servants, not a fucking Hermes bag. We need infrastructure projects. We need national service so people see them as Americans first. We need men your and my age to take more, I think, as much as anything, to take an interest in the well-being of a young boy who is not ours.
Starting point is 01:02:43 Because the number one predictor of a young man ending up in prison or in a basement or committing suicide is the absence of a male role model. And we think, well, but single mothers are our heroes. Yeah, the light of my life was my single mother. But the bottom line is once a boy loses a male role model, he becomes much more prone to addiction. 70% of incarcerated men come from single-parent households. And we're number two in the world behind Sweden in single-parent households.
Starting point is 01:03:10 And that's not to say, that's not to in any way be critical of single mothers. I think they're heroes. But if we want more men, men like us got to step up and start helping boys because there's an entire generation of lost young men out there. I get emails every day from these kids and you can tell they're just struggling. They're trying, but they don't have economic opportunities. They have no romantic opportunities. One third of men under the age of 30 has a girlfriend. One in three has not had sex in
Starting point is 01:03:42 the last year. Two in three women under the age of 30 have a boyfriend because young women are dating up. They're dating older because they want more economic security and more emotional viability. So what's the question? You can't yell at instinct. You can't tell women who they should like. What you need to do is level up young men. But first, we need to have an honest conversation about the problem and not hold an 18-year-old male responsible for the sins of his father or his great-great-grandfather.
Starting point is 01:04:10 I mean, these kids don't think, oh, well, I'm white and I'm male. I got the world in my feed. Show me the data that says that. The most underrepresented group in college right now is men. If we were totally admissions blind at NYU, there'd be colleges there that would probably be not only just 60 or 70% female, they'd be 60 or 70% Asian female because the Asian American community has done such an outstanding job leveling up their kids. And then you have girls who biologically become much more mature faster. They go through puberty earlier. They have a much more developed prefrontal cortex, the gas on, gas off, knowing when to stop doing video games and studying. And they have blown by men academically, and that's a good thing. But we have to increase the amount of opportunities, national service, infrastructure, vocational training, more freshman seats at colleges, and lift the boats of all young people. The percentage of wealth that young people control under the age of 40 has gone from
Starting point is 01:05:09 12% of all wealth to 6% because we keep transferring wealth from young people to old people so that we can get Nana and Pop-Up and upgrade from Crystal to Radisson 7Cs. We have made a concerted decision to take money from young people and give it to old people. And as a result, young men just aren't as attractive to women and we're losing household formation. I'm trying to create dialogues where it's okay to be vulnerable even if you're not supposed to be. So, you know, the easy thing is big, strong guy, fit guy Galloway can talk about, you talk about what depresses them, what makes them cry, what makes them sad. Because we don't do that because it's an illusion of what true strength is. And you're not supposed to talk about how young white men have it tough. No, they need it tough because we have to make up for what young white men have done to everybody else. And I'm
Starting point is 01:06:01 trying to defeat that idea, not for white men per se, but for equity in society in general. And there is no such thing as a selective tide. You know, Sorensen gave Kennedy a great line about the rising tide lifts all boats. You have to create dynamics in your society that allow people to grow and succeed to their own talent level. And the more we do that, the better off we'll be. You say it brilliantly. You remind me of what my pop used to say about the middle class. He hated that term, but we never came up with a better one of, you know, that's what makes America so unique. And that's what other even developed economies don't really have. And we're losing it as well. I think your ideas are
Starting point is 01:06:51 awesome. And I think that this conversation with you is a proof of concept in terms of why everything you're putting out is so readily consumed. And I believe for the right reasons, I've got no protection for you. but I think that you're going to be a really valued commodity for the right reasons for a long time. And I want to thank you as a consumer of what you put out and a believer in why you're doing it.
Starting point is 01:07:16 So thank you for taking this time. I really appreciate that, Chris. And I really hope you reflect on this one thing. I have trust in this brother. The thing you're going to be upset about is not what happened, but how much you beat yourself up over it. Okay. We'll check back in 20 years.
Starting point is 01:07:34 It's a date. Yeah. You'll be looking down at a spot of water where my ashes were spread. Your call sign should be next. You should be totally focused on what's in front of you i was given good advice uh what is it so what that that's what it is now what uh norman lear what's next gave me that advice he was like this is what you need to do yeah and the only the the only thing you're giving me such a generous uh sign off there just in terms of young men i do think we can broaden it not off there, just in terms of young men,
Starting point is 01:08:08 I do think we can broaden it, not just to young white men, but just young men in general. I think young men of color have some advantage applying to college, but to that point, I think it's rough for them too. I think the focus needs to be on how we level up young men. Look, the key to it is, you know, nobody wants to talk about it. It's too Pollyannish. You don't get any advantage out of this in a zero-sum binary game. But all of our great leaders have always had the same message. Whether you believe anything about Jesus or not, his message is what it was.
Starting point is 01:08:37 All the way to Martin Luther King and the Roosevelts and people we've had here, you have to care about one another. You have to lean into your interconnection and interdependence in America. And that's what we're not doing because we get too caught up in type. You know, I don't have any problem with the way you explained what you see going on. I think it's accurate and I think it's efficient.
Starting point is 01:09:00 But, you know, even if, you know, if black people or woke black people or woke females or whatever they want to call themselves are like, whoa, that ship has sailed, brother. It's our time. If you don't care about everybody in a society, you're going to go nowhere. And I think our history is proof of that in the positive and the negative. So listen, I'm here for it. And I appreciate you. And I really appreciate your counsel. Thank you for what your advice is to me. And I am working
Starting point is 01:09:31 on it 24 seven. I promise you that. All right. Thanks. Thanks for all of this and congrats on your success. Scott Galloway. There is a reason that people eat up what he puts out, whether it's in podcasts or in books. It's intelligent. It's backed by data. But most importantly to me, there's a poignance, there's a feel, there's a love, there's a compassion that is driving what he sees and what he hopes can be improved. And he's even got the ideas how to do that. So thank you so much for listening in to him here on the project. Subscribe, follow. You want the merch? You should want the merch. Why don't you wear the merch? Because I'm fat. I got to lose some weight
Starting point is 01:10:16 and then I'll start fitting in the shirts again. But you see where you can get it right here. And I'll see you next time.

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