The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Number One Reason This Generation Is Struggling: Scott Galloway

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

Scott Galloway, or ‘Prof G’ to his fans, is one of the most influential business thought leaders in the world. Host of The Prof G Show, one of the most popular business podcasts in America, he brings his wisdom to his millions of followers and fans who hang on his every word. Scott is unique for his philosophy that people shouldn’t follow their dreams, but instead find something they’re good at, and improve and hone it to a point where they’re recognised for their talent. The author of four New York Times bestselling books, Scott’s expertise ranges broadly, and this conversation does, too. Scott goes over the difference between million dollar and billion dollar businesses, how he sees business leadership, and why people overrate the importance of founders. Follow Scott: Instagram - https://bit.ly/3NdunjW Twitter - https://bit.ly/3W9Y4Gn  Scotts book: https://amzn.to/3FkpH9F  Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. If you could do something that would make you less depressed to be successful, wouldn't you want to take that drug every day? You've got to tell me what it is. So it is... Scott Galloway. He's a public speaker and author, marketing professor at NYU. He's a business world rock star. I'm not done yet.

The number of kids who see their friends every day has been cut in half in the last 10 years. The knock-on effect here is that we're producing too many of what is the most dangerous person in the world, and that is a young, broken, alone man. They get this illusion that they have worth when they say angry, misogynistic content on social media. They become just really shitty citizens. Andrew Tate, the self-described misogynist. If a woman is going out with a man, she belongs to that man.

Is Andrew Tate's message a symptom of what you've described? 100%. They're out of fucking control. How would we go about solving this problem? So... Life gets very hard very fast, 25 to 45. And generally speaking, these are the least happy years. And then something wonderful happens.

You find joy in the mundane as you get older, and you get happier. So I think it's helpful just to know that when you say something stupid at a party, when you say something unkind and you're just beating yourself up, you need to forgive yourself and you need to realize what feels important in the moment isn't that important. Happiness waits for you. What are you still working on?

I'm trying to slow time down. Time is falling off a cliff for me. But how does one practically slow time down so that 30 years doesn't fly past? I find that you can slow time down by... Without further ado, I'm Stephen Butler, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. give me your context what is the necessary context that i'd have to understand about you and your earliest years to make sense of the person that you went on to be in your life wow that's a thoughtful question um raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died a

secretary. A lot of my life, you know, I think the most important thing in anyone's life is to have someone who's rationally passionate about your well-being, and I had that. And the second thing is I was born in California in the 60s, a white heterosexual male, which was like hitting the lottery. I got access to amazing free education. I went to UCLA and Berkeley for graduate and undergraduate degrees, total tuition, $7,000. And not only was it accessible financially, it was accessible period. The admissions rate at UCLA when I applied was 76%. It's now 6%. And I mentioned my sexuality because my freshman roommate in college was born a white homosexual male and was dead of AIDS at the age of 33. So, you know, a lot of my success, whether it was free education, coming of age during the

internet age, which was incredible wind in your economic sales. You know, a lot of my success is not my fault. So the two things that I try and remember that define my start, and it was an amazing start, were one, you know, someone who was irrationally passionate about my well-being and being born in America and just being exceptionally fortunate. You mentioned your mother there. What about your father? My dad, you know, not a bad man. He left us for lack of a better term when I was eight. You know, it was the seventies. He started his third marriage while he was still married to my mom. Neither of my parents are very sophisticated. They were both pulled out of school at the age of

13. My dad was a handsome Scott living in LA, which means he not only thought with his dick, he could listen to it. And, uh, so he, you know, just really enjoyed himself for lack of a better term, which didn't foot well to, uh, you know, a family life. Uh, so he wasn't very involved in my life growing up, but I feel compelled to say now that he's 92, every person's obligation from a species level is to be a better father or mother than their father or mother was to them. And he was definitely that. He was, he grew up in terrible circumstances and he always tried to do the right thing, but it was, you know, it was me

and my mom. Was it a happy childhood in your view? It was entirely, Steve, you were talking a little bit about your childhood. It was entirely unremarkable. I feel like on a scale of one to a hundred, a hundred being the best childhood in the world, one being the worst. In America, at least I was like a 50. It wasn't bad. You know, we didn't have any, we didn't have, we were upper, lower middle-class, but it wasn't a sob story. In America, in the 70s, you could survive on a secretary salary. We took vacations. I didn't go to good schools, but they were bad schools. I had friends, but not a lot of friends. My high school reunion was recently, no one would remember me. My childhood was remarkably unremarkable.

It wasn't bad. It's not a sob story, but it wasn't what I would call great with a lot of support and a lot of accoutrements. But again, the context of it is being at the median in California in the 70s was like hitting the lottery. It was the highest median in the world. What was your relationship like with money? Because I remember reading that that was quite your relationship with money and your family's relationship with money was quite formative. Money very early had a big impact on me because, you know, people say, oh, at the time,

having a divorced mom felt like a little bit of a, not a scarlet letter, but you were the kid who lived with his mother. But the thing that was harder was we didn't have any money. I mean, we weren't poor, but you apply to college and if you didn't get into UCLA, which I didn't get in, there were no options. We didn't have the confidence or the contacts or the money to apply for me to apply to college outside of school. It was stressful. And, but it was also in some ways, very motivating. My mom got sick when I was a young adult and I, me being the only child and some of those, you know, instincts that a son feels for his mother take over. And when my mom got sick, I decided, all right, I, I remember coming home one weekend, she was very ill.

And I remember thinking a kind of like, I'm not doing my job as a man because I don't have the money to take care of her. And that was really emasculating. And that's when I kind of got my shit together. I remember the moment it was when I was in graduate school, I was 26. And look, I decided very early and people,

I think people who have achieved some level of wealth aren't entirely forthcoming or honest. I think about money a lot. I was very focused on it. I decided very early that I was going to have economic security. I did nothing but pretty much work for 20 years. I don't remember much else but work. It cost me my hair, it cost me my first marriage, and it was worth it. Is there a risk in that, that when we become so orientated by money, I've had this conversation with a few guests about, are we really driven or are we being dragged? And how do we make sure we're not being dragged so we can be intentional about living lives in line with our values?

Yeah, I'm not proposing this is what the world should be. I'm proposing what it is in a capitalist society. And that is, I think America, I just moved here. So I don't know if society is different here. I have noticed here that people ask you where you're from. In America, they ask you what you do. But America becomes more like itself every day. And that it is a kind, generous place if you have money. It's a rapacious, violent place if you don't have money. And I figured that out very, very soon. The way I saw it was that poor people having an entirely different experience with the U.S. healthcare system than rich people.

I just saw it as, if I want to have a life of opportunity, of prosperity, selection set of mates, even love, to be wealthy in America is to be loved. People find you interesting. They want to know you. You have a broader selection set of mates. It is the idolatry of the dollar and the impact that wealth has on

your life in America is unfortunate and 100% true, and it gets more true every day. And one of the things I coach young people around is you just have to figure out a way to become economically viable. I'm not saying you need to do what I did and work all the time and be very kind of, have a monocular focus on money, which I did. I think there's a lot of people who decide they're not gonna live to work, they're gonna work to live.

And they move to a lower cost region. They live within their means and they have really good lives. I think that's a nice way to live your life. The majority of young people I'm around, by virtue of the fact I teach at a business school, expect to not only be in the top 10%, they expect to be in the top 1% economically. And so what I encourage young people to do is have a sober conversation. Where do you expect to be economically? And the majority of young people

you talk to expect to be in the top 1%. And I don't know anyone who's gotten there who didn't inherit money, who didn't sacrifice a lot. And what I tell young people is you can't have it all. You just can't have it all at once. And I think in this competitive environment, to be great at anything, you not only need talent, you not only need luck, you just need a tremendous amount of grit and a tremendous commitment. There are some people who are so talented that they can have balance in their lives at a young age and get economic security. I think you should assume you're not one of those people and assume that, like most of us who have achieved some level of economic security, it's required a significant tradeoff. It came at a cost.

It came at a cost of relationships. It came at a cost of relationships. It came at a cost of stress. I mean, it takes a toll. But the reason I have balance in my life right now, I have a lot of balance in my life right now, is because I didn't have very much when I was your age, when I was young. I mean, you're an entrepreneur. It's hard to phone it in as an entrepreneur. It just requires a level of, people think we're just so, we're extraordinarily talented that we're just blessed with some special skill. I would argue that you have more of a risk appetite. You're willing to endure public failure because there's no blaming anyone else when your business crashes. It's very public failure.

And also, more than anything, you have a natural instinct to be thinking about the business all the time and working at it most of the time. There's a relationship between intelligence and success, but it tops out at about 110, 120 IQ. It's better to be smart. You're more likely to be successful if you're smart, but the difference between being smart and being genius has no correlation between success. That's where grit and perseverance and resilience take over. I want to continue that thread, but on one of the things you said at the start of this conversation was about your mother's, she got sick. I read that she, you remember the day when you realized that she was depressed. Yep. How did that shape your views on happiness and fulfillment and depression and how we, how we ultimately end up in a situation where we're suffering with depression? Did,

was that at all, did that influence your view on happiness watching your mother become depressed? Yeah, my mom was sincerely depressed, severely depressed, but I remember, and that's one of the wonderful things about our liberal arts education. I took psychology and they started talking about clinical depression, what it meant. And I realized that's what my mom was suffering from. And depression is sort of the cancer of our generation.

And that is, it used to be closeted. Now people are openly talking about it. And it's really helpful because I wish I'd known what my mom was going through earlier. Because you immediately, we're a narcissistic species. You really think it's something you've done. going through earlier because you immediately, you know, we're a narcissistic species.

You really think it's something you've done. It's not about you usually, it's about them. And also life isn't about what happens to you. It's about how you respond to what happens to you. And I think it's very helpful when you recognize depression and understand it and recognize in other people because what you then realize is that when you're feeling really down,

a lot of times it's not your fault. You may have substantial reason to be depressed, but you may not. a lot of times it's not your fault. You may have substantial reason to be depressed, but you may not. A lot of it is about your chemistry that day. And also to recognize that this too shall pass, that nothing, a saying that's been really important to me, and it's one of the few sayings that's always kind of held its water for me, is nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems. When you feel like you're killing it, when you feel like you're on top of the world, that's absolutely the time to bring in your horns and be humble and grateful and realize a lot of your success isn't your fault. You just got lucky. And at the same time,

when you're upset, when you're angry at yourself, when you're depressed, when you feel like everything's just black, it's not. That's temporary. And it's comforting to know that that will pass. Understanding what my mom was going through was external, that it wasn't because things are so bad for us or so bad for her, that this was a chemical thing. This was like catching a cold. That was really liberating and helpful, not only to manage the situation in our household,

but to recognize when I was down and also to recognize that I was probably gonna be more prone or vulnerable to that type of depression. But just being aware of these things, you're a young man. When I was a kid, we didn't talk about depression. We used to call it a nervous breakdown and it was a sign of weakness

and it only happened to women, right? They were the weaker gender and they had something called a nervous breakdown. That was what mental health, that's what depression was called back then. And then slowly but surely, people started to acknowledge that it was a thing, that it was no different than any other type of illness, that it was treatable, and that it wasn't a sign of shame. So it was really helpful for me. It was liberating to kind of understand it and realize that it wasn't totally a function of our situation or an indication of how good

or bad things were at the time. One of the things you talk about in your new book, Adrift, is this decay of community in our lives. Yeah. And community seems like such a human thing. So when I read that, I thought maybe that's in part of the causal factor of why we're seeing a lot of unhappiness, depression, and these things. What's your take on that? 100%. Do you have dogs? I know you don't have kids. Yeah, I do. I have a dog upstairs. So look, dogs just wanna be around other beings. And mammals are social. We're very social. We, you know, from a young age, we suckle. We're, we just wanna, my dogs lie on top of each other.

I mean, we're meant to be around each other. And whether it's in the US, enrollment in Boy and Girl Scouts is off by like 40%. Church attendance is way down. The percentage of people who speak to their neighbors is off like 40%. If you just think about COVID, we don't go to the mall. We don't go to movie theaters, right?

We're becoming more and more segregated by income class. The number of kids who see their friends every day has been cut in half in the last 10 years. So we're just not touching, smelling, and feeling each other nearly as much. And I think that's directly correlated to happiness. My youngest really struggled with COVID. And we always said, well, it's because he's not in school because the schools were closed for a while. And I thought more than school, what my kid needs is other kids. And that is, you need guardrails,

you need people around you. I think of those Japanese soldiers who retreated into the hills of the Philippines with orders to not give up the island. You know, when the Japanese withdrew from the Philippine islands in the South Pacific, they left behind some of these soldiers. Some of them were there for 20 or 30 years, and they refused

to give up their commission until they would have to find the commanding officer, take them to the island, and tell them, come down. The war's been over for 25 years. These individuals accomplished nothing. They didn't grow spiritually, physically. They didn't learn anything. They had nothing to share with anyone after their 25 years. So being alone is one of the worst things on an extended basis that can happen to a human. And every day, one of the worst things that can happen to a human is happening more and more to all of us in Western society. And it's especially prevalent among kids. on kids, the lack of socialization, and then this kind of hyper socialization that takes place on their phone, which is really brutal and has huge externalities, is I think one of the biggest

causes for the massive uptick in depression among young people. So again, I like to coach younger people. I'm like, put yourself in a position where you have to be around other people every day, building something in the agency of something else, whether it's a job, whether it's a nonprofit, whether it's church, whether it's a sports league, be in the agency of others, building something bigger than all of you. And it's a great way to make friends, mentors. It's a great way to learn how to read the room. I joined a fraternity when I went to UCLA when I was 17. And people make a cartoon of fraternity. Like we're all these terrible people. It was the best thing I could have done.

I had no male role models until the age of 17. My dad wasn't around. I didn't have many friends. So being in a place that shrunk a 30,000 person campus down to a smaller thing, I wouldn't have graduated. And it was hard for me. These, my quote unquote fraternity brothers gave me a hard time, but it was really good for me.

You know, you get in better shape. I remember my roommates telling me to stop smoking so much pot and go to class more. I mean, you have people watching you 24 by seven. I needed that socialization. So I think one of the worst things that can happen to a young adult is for them to be isolated. And we're increasingly isolated. Are you optimistic about that changing? Because the direction of travel is in one direction. And then when you hear things

about metaverses. Yeah, I'm not. I think we have this nihilistic, I think technology is nihilistic. I think the most successful person in the world, at least monetarily, wants to figure out a way to inhabit another planet rather than focus his genius and his resources on making this planet more habitable. And I find that nihilistic. And people, I just find it strange that the most talented, wealthiest people in the world want to get us off the planet.

So, and then you think about social media, just the trends among young people, there's an uptick in travel, but that's pent up demand by a class of people who have the money to travel. Our socialization appears to have taken a dramatic step change, structural step change down. And I even see to my kids, they are thinking about getting home to their phones and they're social on their phones, but it's not a replacement for person-to-person contact. There's some good things to it. Teen drunk driving accidents are down, teen pregnancy is way down, but the number of kids socializing is way off.

I find it, I think it's a terrible thing and I don't see, there'll be some uptick because COVID's over, but it feels like there's been a structural step change down because people now want the dopa they get trading on Robinhood, watching porn, watching Netflix, getting some sort of socialization or need for affirmation by the number of likes they get on Twitter, rather than leaving their house to get that same type of dopa hit. The number of people to get on Twitter, rather than leaving their house to get that same type of hit. The number of people playing in organized sports is way down. So I'm not, I think it's a real problem and I don't see it unless there's recognition of it and external investment, whether it's youth clubs, whether it's afterschool programs, whether it's some sort of conscription or national service, which I'm a

big fan of, I don't see structured means for people, young people to serve in the agency of something bigger than themselves. Do you think there's a decline in grit amongst young people, that this Gen Z generation in the Western world, when you think about your kids and the grit they'll have, you talked about how important grit is to achieving economic viability. I was talking to Simon Sinek about this a couple of weeks ago on this podcast about whether Gen Z are less resilient and hardworking than generations that have come before them, because of the influences. I remember I opened up TikTok the other day and it's like, it's showing, I don't know whether this was just the TikTok I saw, I remember one going viral on

Twitter a couple of weeks ago from San Francisco, showing the day in the life of a Gen Z working in tech. And it's like, wake up, go get the frappuccino latte, whatever. Take the dog for a walk. Take the dog for a pottery class. I love that. Five minutes on the laptop, pottery classes. Yoga.

I worry about this a lot with my kids because generally speaking, what happens is the children of, I would say if I had what my kids have, I wouldn't have what I have because I wasn't that motivated. If I'd grown up in the household, my kids are growing up now, the only two things I know I would have had in my life as a young man are a Range Rover and a cocaine habit. I just wasn't, an absence of money really motivated me. And my kids don't have that. My kids have access to everything they need. And so trying to figure out a way

to instill grit in your kids, whether it's chores or some level of discipline, I think it's my biggest challenges or our biggest challenges as parents. But in terms of the, I work with, and granted it's selection bias, I work, the kids I work with, I can't get over how extraordinarily talented they are.

So the meme of quiet quitting, and again, it may be proximity bias because of the kids I draw or I know in my firm. But I find that every year, and I teach between 300 and 500 kids a year at NYU, every year I find that the kids, the young adults, are more talented and harder working and more socially conscious. Sure, they're a little expectant. Some of it I roll my eyes. Occasionally I'll say someone say, I need to leave and go to Pilates class. And I kind of laugh, I roll my eyes. You know, occasionally I'll say someone say, you know, I need to leave and go to Pilates class. And I kind of laugh, like, I can't even imagine saying that to my boss when I started out. But in general, I find they're just remarkable. And again,

it might be because of the kids I've been able to attract, but I don't buy this notion that they're somehow entitled. I haven't seen that. When you're teaching these young people about and preparing them mentally and with skills for the world that's to come, what is a key indicator that that young person will become a successful adult, professional, entrepreneur, business owner? Yeah. I can't speak to entrepreneur. We're very data-driven. So I started around a company called L2, which was a business intelligence firm. We grew it to about 120 people and then we sold it. And we were very data driven and we used to, you know, evaluate everybody every year. And then we

would try and look for correlations. And while it's dangerous to do, and no one wrote it down, the correlations we found that were the best predictors of success at our firm were a few things. One, they went to a great school, which you don't like to say, but most of our kids who are really, really strong had gone to what you would consider elite universities. Two, they were athletes. We found that a background in sports, especially individual sports, whether it was gymnastics or diving, that these people just brought a certain level of discipline and grit that some of the others didn't have. And the third is female. Because we had such a young firm, a disproportionate amount of our really successful people were women. And there's a lot of studies showing now that women just mature

at an earlier age. The net of it for us was, and you were scared to write it down and I've sold the firm so I can say it now. If a woman from the Yale gymnastics team showed up, she was an automatic hire. And I don't think that's anything unusual or that groundbreaking. I graduated from UCLA with a 2.27 GPA.

I don't know if you have grades, but basically I barely graduated. And I got a job at Morgan Stanley right out of UCLA, which was considered a pretty prestigious firm. And it's because the guy who ran the department had road crew. And I was an oarsman at UCLA. And he said, anyone who rose crew gets an automatic hire because you're willing to kill yourself. You can push yourself harder than anyone. So a lot of these firms recognize that sports are a forward-looking indicator, but some of the other indicators you can't control, you know, getting into an elite university now is a function of being the son or daughter of someone rich or being freakishly

remarkable, kind of two cohorts. And then obviously you can't control your sex, but I have several women in their early twenties working for me who could be the junior senator, could be the next ambassador to France. And a lot of the young men have a lot of potential, but you can just see they just don't mature as fast. NYU, what else are you teaching these kids? I call them kids, they're my age. Yeah, well, I mean, it's mostly principles of brand strategy and digital marketing. But I have a course, I have a session that the most popular session is on.

I call it the algebra of happiness. And I just go through sort of basic best practices for success. And we've talked about some of them. Realizing balance, I think, is a myth. I think the most important decision you'll make in your 20s and 30s, you know, I serve at a class. What's the most important decision you'll make? And they usually say the industry you'll go into, where you decide to live.

The most important decision you'll make is who you decide to partner with, specifically have kids, because you're in that person's life for 20 years. And I have a lot of friends who are successful in most exterior metrics, but don't have a real partner in their spouse. And they have what I would call a life full of stress and disappointment on a regular basis. Whereas I have friends who on an external

basis may not look as successful, but they have a real partner and everything just burns brighter for them. So the most important decision you'll make is who you're fortunate or not fortunate enough to partner with. And so what I suggest is that they be as aggressive as possible about creating as many opportunities for serendipity and contact with people. That your ability to punch above your weight class and find someone of great character that you're attracted to, that you fit with, is a function of liquidity. And that is always accept invitations to dinner parties. I think young men should be more aggressive. I think young men have been told in this environment that they should be very careful

about who they approach and express interest in. And I think there is a huge difference between expressing interest in a thoughtful way and harassing someone. And if you don't know the difference, you've got much bigger problems. But I encourage young men to, as a general cognitive

or behavioral therapy, to force themselves when they're in a line of coffee to talk to some of the guy or gal in front of them and behind them. Because if you're interested in someone, there's nothing wrong with asking them out to coffee. There's nothing wrong with expressing interest. And I see a lot of young men are not creating that types of opportunities to meet people and eventually find good friends, find good mentors, and most importantly, find a good mate. And so unfortunately, marriage and relationships are becoming another luxury item.

Marriage and pairing off with a mate is plummeting among people. It's correlated to your wealth because middle income and poor people, especially men are no longer, because of online dating, are no longer seen as viable mates. And they also don't have as many opportunities to meet people in person

where there's things like smell and vibe and humor that are some of the magic mystery of why we're attracted to each other. But what I tell them is create as many opportunities as possible to establish relationships. So it's give up balance, but if and when you can invest all of your remaining energy in having as many, you know, random contacts with people as possible and also be aggressive. Talk to people, introduce yourself. If you're interested in someone, if you want to establish a friendship,

if you're interested in someone romantically, express that interest. If they're not interested in you, both of you are going to be fine. You can handle the rejection or the small rejection. They can handle someone expressing interest. And I think in our age, we've, in a weird way, implicitly told young people, especially men,

they're not supposed to express that interest. What do you make of dating apps? Well, I think my advice to young people would be to do it all. It's how people meet. It used to be how people made it, if you will, is that it used to be a third work, a third friends, and a third school. Now it's well above 50% online. So the majority of relationships are beginning online for people your age. And it's very efficient. But what happens when technology comes into any sector is it consolidates it. It becomes a winner-take-most market. So whether it's e-commerce, social media, search engines, once technology comes into it, you have one company that owns 50% of all

online retail, two-thirds of all social, and 93% of search. So technology is coming to mating with dating apps. And it's created a winner-take-all or winner-take-most dynamic, which is somewhat unhealthy. And it plays out like something like this. Women are interested in men based on three criteria. The first is their ability to signal resources. The second is intelligence. And the third is kindness. It doesn't matter how rich or how smart you are. If you're an asshole or you're not kind, people eventually don't want you as a mate. And unfortunately online, it's very difficult to signal two and three. So you can signal one. And when everyone has access to

everyone, women who have a much finer filter for mating, because the downside of sex is so much greater for them if they get pregnant. So they have much finer filter. They end up all being drawn or expressing interest to a much smaller group of individuals. So what the dynamic is, you have 50 men on Tinder, 50 women on Tinder. 46 of the women will express all of their interests to just four men, which leaves 46 men vying for the attention of just four women. So if you apply the Gini coefficient to online dating, it's got the same Gini coefficient as income inequality in Venezuela. So mating inequality is greater than income inequality in Venezuela. And what it leads to is what I call Porsche polygamy. And that is that men who are the top 10% in terms of attractiveness online get 90% of the interest.

So that does not lead to good behavior or establishing long-term relationships. Kind of 50 to 90 percentile do okay. But the bottom half of attractiveness of men based on online attractiveness are totally shut out of the market. And as a result, in America, one in three males under the age of 30 has not had sex in the last 12 months. And I find people hear the term sex and their mind goes different places. I think of it as the key step to an elemental foundation of any society, and that is relationship. So in the US, what's happened with online dating is it's amazing for the top 10% of attractiveness of men. It's okay for the top half. It is a disaster for the bottom

half. And when I say attractiveness, I mean by very crude metrics. So if your Tinder profile, I went to MIT, I just started at KKR and my Rolex accidentally is visible in my profile picture and I'm geolocated living in Manhattan or living in Beverly Hills, you're gonna get a massive amount of attention. The bottom half who are not able to express anything other than wealth, which they may not have, are totally shut out of the market. And the knock-on effect here is that we're producing too

many of what is the most dangerous person in the world, and that is a young, broken, alone man. So the guy who attacked Salman Rushdie recently in the US, that wasn't about the fatwa, that was about a young man living in his mother's basement. When you hear about mass shooters in the US. That wasn't about the fatwa. That was about a young man living in his mother's basement. When you hear about mass shooters in the US, you know who they are before you know who they are. So we are producing an enormous cohort of economically and emotionally non-viable men. And I think it's bad for society. I think it creates an existential risk for us. I think women, as a result, don't have as many, find there just aren't as many economically or emotionally valuable men as they would like. Women are graduating at double the rates of college as men now. For every one male

graduate in the next five years of college, there's going to be two women. And you think, well, okay, it's time women leveled up. They're finally getting their due. Okay. But this has, just realize this has huge societal impacts because women made socioeconomically horizontally and up, men horizontally and down. In some, women with college degrees typically aren't interested in men without college degrees.

So we're seeing less household formation, lower birth rates, and these things usually stunt an economy. So I're seeing less household formation, lower birth rates, and these things usually stunt an economy. So I think it's a big issue. And again, I think it comes down to providing more opportunity for young people in general. I think if you had sort of gender-specific affirmative action towards men, it would just become so politicized and heated that it wouldn't be worth it. I think you need a massive leveling up of all young people that I think will disproportionately help young men. How do we get those bottom 50% of young men laid? I think you need to make them first and foremost, more economically viable.

I think more job opportunities. I think it builds confidence. I think you need to get them out of the house. I think it's vocational programs. I think it's opportunities to go to college or get some sort of certification. I think it's things as basic as social service or more opportunities for them to get together. Community. Yeah, and I think it's a certain amount of education that embrace some of the things that are wonderful

be about being a man. Being aggressive is fine. Be physically fit and strong. I think we're blessed with, and this is true of men and women, I'm a big fan. I believe that a forward-looking indicator of your success is the amount of time you spend sweating

versus watching other people sweat. Any person under the age of 30, man or woman should be able to walk into any room and think if shit got real, I could kill and eat everybody or outrun them, one or the other. And it's not about being ripped, it's not about being skinny,

it's about being a stronger version of yourself. You'll be happier, less prone to depression, more attractive to other mates, you'll be kinder because you will feel more confident. So I think embracing physical fitness, young people have one thing that's terrible about young people is they've gotten unhealthier consistently the last 50 years. I think social service, and I think figuring out

institutions and means, whether it's school or social service, so they can meet each other, develop friendships, fall in love, have more opportunities to have not only make relationships, but have guardrails. Young men need guardrails. They need a girlfriend, a job to tell them, no, you need to put on a shirt and get into work. No, you can't get high and drunk every night. No, if you wanna continue to have sex with me, you need to get your shit together. I think that's really important for a young man,

especially young men. And young women need it as well, but just not as much. So I think what you have is a generation of young men that have no motivation, no guardrails. They get their dope hit of addiction on Robin Hood. They don't have the mojo to get out there and meet women as much because they're watching so much porn. They get this illusion that they have some sort of worth or affirmation when they say angry things on social Specifically, they start blaming women and they become much more prone to misogynistic content. They start believing in conspiracy theory. They're less likely to believe in climate change. And some, they become just really shitty citizens. And we're producing just a massive amount of these individuals. And the scary part is,

we'll just ignore the weirdo and put them in the corner. The problem is the government doesn't ignore them because we're very misogynistic when it comes to our elected leaders. In the US, we've been producing more female college graduates than male college graduates for the last 40 years. But still only 28% of our elected representatives are female. People, societies, men and women

conflate leadership quality with height and depth of voice. So we will always, at least in the US for a long time, elect more men. And who do these men appeal to? How do they get elected? They appeal to this cohort of conspiracy-driven, misogynistic, anti-government young men. These young men will always have over-representation in government, which leads to elected leaders saying that they believe the elections are rigged, that stoke nationalist fears, that blame immigrants. I mean, really, really hateful stuff. And so not only are these individuals dangerous and unproductive, but what's even more unproductive is they will have a disproportionate voice in our politics

because the easiest way to get elected is to tap into the tribal instincts or motives of this cohort. You said misogynistic content there. And one of the things that came to mind when you said that was Andy Tate. Yeah. Are you familiar with this person? Yeah. Is Andrew Tate's message a symptom of what you've described? 100%. Look, it's easy to credit your grit and your character for your successes and blame the markets for your failures. And so when you have a young man who is failing, he's looking for culprits. And then you have someone come along and say, it's not your fault. And they start saying that the reason you can't find a date, it's women's fault. It's their fault.

It's not yours. It's not that you haven't developed the skills or demonstrated the discipline to develop the attributes that others find attractive. It's their fault. And I think it's very dangerous. And most of it's a grift. The individual you represented claims it's not your fault, but by my 49.95, learn how to be successful program. It really is a grift. And people, Trump is sort of a version of that, right?

I mean, if you think about what's happening in America, the Democratic Party is basically becoming the party of educated women. And the Republican Party is becoming the party of uneducated men. So, yeah, I think that those types of individuals are perfect examples of trapping, of kind of falling into this really ugly, you know, blame others kind of gestalt in our society. I think it's very unfortunate. I think we also on the, I have no idea what your politics are, Steve. I consider myself a progressive. I think progressives have to take back masculinity. And that is we have to define what masculinity

means and show a vision. Why are all the dudes, these conservatives? So, I mean, I'll give you an example. I'm a profane and vulgar person and on the left they immediately complain conflate i've cursed several times on this show i talk about sex very openly and very crudely that doesn't mean i'm not that doesn't mean i'm not a feminist doesn't mean i don't have progressive values so i think the left needs to take back profanity and vulgarity and i think we need to take back masculinity i see masculinity as a man-made societal construct, but we need to identify it and then ask young men to foot to those skills.

And I see it as very basic, in a very basic way, acquiring the skills and strengths so you can advocate for and protect others, whether it's physical strength, mental strength, financial strength, kindness, intelligence. And I think saying, okay, it's great to be a man, express your masculinity. And by the way, masculinity isn't just the domain of people who are born men. Women can demonstrate masculine features just as men can demonstrate feminine features. But I think the left or progressives

need to take back this notion of masculinity. And we've sort of emasculated on the left men because to be pro-man, to even acknowledge masculinity, is somehow to be anti-female on the left. And that's not true at all. You know who wants more men? Women. Or that's what I find. So I think the key to restoring balance, if you will, and not having our party split across gender lines and pull this generation of failing young men out of this hole is to redefine masculinity as something more evolved, more thoughtful, that involves intelligence, that involves kindness, that involves strength, but also on the left to say, it's okay to be a man. We can acknowledge our differences. It's okay to be aggressive. You know, when Russians

pour over the border in Ukraine, you want some of that big dick energy. You know, there's some features of distinct to men that is really important in our society and should be celebrated. And all of it has been, in my opinion, not all of it, a lot of it has been on the left, conflated with toxicity. And there's some of those attributes that can lead to terrible behavior, but most of it is a good thing in our society. Most of it is needed. And there was a big smile on the front of your book. Yeah. Part of the reason why you put that, what looks like a smiley face on it is because of this arc of happiness that you describe. That was quite surprising to me. What do you mean by an arc of happiness? Well, across almost every culture,

the correlation between age and happiness is a smile. So zero to kind of 25 is beer, Star Wars, you know, making out, prom, college football, or, you know, Premier League football. Zero to 25 is usually pretty happy. 25 to 45 is what I call the shit gets real years. You realize that distinct to what your parents or your uni told you, you're not going to have a fragrance named after you or be a member of parliament. You have kids, you have economic stress. Someone you love a great deal gets sick and dies, your parents, right? Life gets very hard,

very fast, 25 to 45. And generally speaking, these are the least happy years. And then something wonderful happens usually in your late 40s or early 50s. And that is you start recognizing the finite nature of life. Maybe you have some economic security, maybe you've established relationships, maybe you have these really wonderful things that are less awful, that look, smell, and feel like you called kids. You realize that life is short. You start finding appreciation. I don't know if you remember this, Steve. Do you remember going out with your parents and your mom and your mom would like a salad would come and she'd stop the table and say, look at how beautiful the salad is. Or just admire the flowers. And you think, you used to think as a kid, like,

what the fuck? And when you realize it's so weird when you turn into your... I stopped outside my house, there's a garden, and I just couldn't stop marveling at the garden. The garden's here. I've never seen anything like it. We have this garden across from us in the park, and I'm like, who are the gnomes that come out at night and manicure this thing so perfectly? And I'm not into botany or horticulture. And I can't stop marveling. I wouldn't have done that in my 27-year-old self. But I do it at my 57. I find you find joy in new things.

You find joy in the mundane as you get older. And you get happier. And the happiest generation, the happiest age cohort is the cohort that should be the least happy because they're not healthy is old people. So the learning here is that if you wake up at 35 and you have a couple of kids and you have a spouse or you have a job and you think, shit, this is hard. I'm not that happy. Recognize that's part of the journey and just keep on keeping on. Happiness waits for you in most instances. So happiness is absolutely a smile.

And so I think it's helpful just to know that, that as you move into your income earning years, as you move into your mating and child rearing years and the depth of work and your parents start aging, it's stressful and it's hard. And if you're unhappy or feel unhappy at times, that is normal. That's part of the journey. And for me, it was helpful to read that because I'm looking forward to all the happiness that's kind of coming my way and I can feel it as you get older. You just start finding joy in weird places.

When was the pit of your arc in your life? When were your hardest years as it relates to happiness? Well, losing my mom was tough for me. But I think that the pit for me, you're an entrepreneur, the highs are really high and the lows are really low. The closest I can equate it to is having a business like having a kid. You conceive the thing, it looks, smells, and feels like you. And when it does well, it's just like when your kid scores a goal or is doing great or seems happy, there's just no joy like that. When something comes, you have your world of work, you have your world of friends, and you have kids. You don't have kids yet, Stevie, you'll find this out. When something goes wrong with one of your kids, the whole universe shrinks to what is wrong with your kid.

I mean, nothing else matters. And you just can't sleep. You're stressed. You're upset. You feel failure on a cosmic level because this instinct that pours over us is if your kid is failing, you have failed on a more cosmic level because you haven't been able to protect that kid. It's the same way with a business. So when your business fails, it's impossible to remove yourself from that failure. My lowest moment probably professionally was in the great financial recession of 2008. In 99, I was a young man and was wealthy on paper. I'd started several

e-commerce companies. I didn't realize most of it was not my fault, that it was the market. And by the end of 2000, I was broke. I lost everything through the dot-com crash. Clawed my way back to some level of economic security in 2007, smacked again in 2008, lost almost everything. And then my young son or my oldest had the poor judgment to come marching out of my girlfriend. So I was broke and I had a son, a newborn. And a combination of the disappointment professionally where I was now 40 years old and wasn't economically where I thought it would be was really upsetting and disappointing. And then the stress when you're a dude with no spouse or kids, you can kind of dance between

the raindrops. If you need to, you can sleep on a couch. I always knew I could make a living. I could support myself. But living in New York, having what felt like economic failure, business failure, and a kid, and it's like, okay, my failures are now this kid's failures, that was really stressful. It was also very motivating. You know, I'd made some money. So I had made enough money to live kind of a fake wealthy life. I had nice clothes, a nice apartment. I could go to St. Bart's.

I had just enough money to give the illusion of success. But there's no faking it when you have kids. This person is dependent upon you. I was living in New York. It's impossible not to make a good living in New York with kids. And so that was wildly stressful. It was like, okay, this is no longer about me.

When I fail economically, I'm failing as a species. I'm failing as a dad. That was a rough time. 2008, 2009 was rough, but it was also very motivating because I got very serious and started working very hard. And again, I didn't see my kids.

We had another kid two and a half years later. I didn't see much of my kids until the age of five. I try and get home for bath time, but I was very focused on getting my household back on economic firm footing again. but I was very focused on getting my household back on economic firm footing again. But that was very stressful. That's your biggest sort of professional failure. What about your biggest personal pit? Pit. And what did it teach you? Oh, I don't know. I think, are both your parents still alive? Yeah. Okay, so one of them will get sick and die.

And that is the heart. The two things I found that kind of turn you into an adult are when you lose one of your parents. It's just the harshness of it is so unthinkable. As a species, we have an inability to wrap our head around death for good reason. Otherwise, we'd all just be freaked out and not willing to take risks and not hunt animals for fear they might kill us, not take risks, never go outside.

So we purposely can't understand it. We can't imagine it. You can't imagine that this person's gonna be gone and it is over. That is devastating. And it also just brings this harshness of life, like really present in front of you. But at the same time, it creates tremendous perspective that, wow, the mortality rate's 100%.

My kids are going to have the same tragedy when I die. And I think it can liberate you and realize that, okay, if I feel embarrassed, if I feel scared about risks, if I'm beating myself up over a mistake I made, you know what? It really doesn't matter that much. You should be kinder to yourself. You should be more forgiving. There's great work by my colleague at NYU, Adam Alter, on palliative care, where he surveys people who are weeks from the end. And they have a lot of regrets. They wish they'd lived the life they want to live, whether it was being more open about their sexuality, being who they wanted to be with, going to the career they wanted to go with. They were living their lives for other people. It's a

huge regret or society. They wish they'd stayed in better contact with friends. But more than anything, their number one regret is they wish they'd been less harsh on themselves. And that is, again, life isn't about what happens to you. It's how you respond to what happens to you. And when someone dies and you realize the finite nature of life, and then we all have the same end coming, I think it's liberating because what you realize is when you say something stupid at a board meeting, even when you have a business fail, when you pick a stock and it gets cut in half in two weeks, and you're just hating on yourself.

When you say something stupid at a party, when you say something unkind, unwittingly, and you're just like, Jesus, what was I thinking? And you're just beating yourself up, realize it's the person you're worried about, what they think of you, your situation, it's going to go really fast and it's going to be over. And all you're going to have is the people that miss you. So you need to forgive yourself and you need to realize what feels important in the moment isn't that important. And I found it very liberating. I was devastated losing a parent and was really my only parent. But at the same time, it just gave me a lot of perspective. And then I think the second moment in your life where you start to grow up is when you have a kid. Because up until that moment, and I'm naturally a selfish person, it comes very easily to me, but it's the first time

in your life you're more concerned with someone else's well-being. And it's a strange sense to want someone else to be more concerned about someone else's well-being than yours. I mean, truly more concerned. And it's somewhat liberating. When I was your age, on Friday, I'd start getting stressed like, what fabulous people am I hanging out with? What amazing thing am I doing? How can I hang around more interesting and hotter people? How can I have better experiences, more sex with hotter people, make more money, make more money. Now it's like, okay, we got soccer practice Saturday morning. We got a play date Saturday. It's all of a sudden just about them. I mean, it's literally just about them.

And for the first few years, that takes some adapting. But what you find, I find it's relaxing now to be more focused on someone else, I find is relaxing and rewarding instead of just all you all the time, right? So losing someone and gaining someone, I think, are the kind of key moments where you sort of grow up. I mean, losing your parent is something that happens to everybody. The economic strain I have, most people would pray for, but personal troughs, I've been really blessed so far. You talked a little bit there about self-doubt. Do you struggle with self-doubt? Oh, yeah. I have a huge imposter syndrome, but I think it's healthy and I think most people have it, I think. Yeah, sure. Every time I've raised money,

I've thought I was fooling them and committing fraud. Like, oh God, I just raised $37 million from my ed tech startup. What were they thinking? You know, what were they thinking? I don't, you know, weird things. Like I get, I'm sure you get fan mail or if people who listen to my podcast or want to meet me or have dinner with me, I don't like to do it because I always find they're going to be disappointed that the person they think I am, I'm just not that interesting or that cool. I always worry that at the end of the day, my natural state will be to be broken alone,

that that's kind of like what my personality traits where they'll lead me. I have those fears every day. I have huge imposter syndrome. Yeah, but again, it's motivating. It's like, well, okay, prove yourself and then I'm wrong. So I wouldn't describe myself. I'm confident on certain levels, but i always feel like a little bit like every time i have

an achievement that i've like kind of fooled everybody do you know where that comes from because i i'm not sure if that's everybody i sit here with a lot of people so i see a variance yeah i don't know yeah i really don't know i don where, um, I don't know where it comes from, but yeah, I definitely have something whispering in my ear. Like, you know, who the fuck are you kidding? Like, yeah, you're, you tempt, you fooled him temporarily, but it's all going to come crashing down. Yeah. I have that. When I was reading through a lot of things you'd said about yourself, you, you also had called yourself an asshole a few times. What do you mean by that? And why were you an asshole? Yeah. Someone who wasn't kind, someone who put their own needs ahead of other people.

I wasn't very kind to my first wife. I should have been, as an early manager, I should have been kinder to my employees. Yeah. An asshole. Why? Why? How? I don't know. I guess because I could or I don't know. I like to think that I've gotten better as I've gotten older. I think in America, there's this, at least, and it's changing in the world I grew up in. I think it's kind of started with Steve Jobs. You know, here's a guy who, I think there's this unfortunate gestalt in American business that if you're talented and super nice, you're talented. If you're talented and a bit of an asshole, you're a genius. It was seen as leadership to be in a room and get angry or point out the problems or dress somebody down.

I think that's changed for the better in the last 10 years. But everybody was trying to be Steve Jobs. And there's no getting around it. He was cruel at work. He denied his own blood under oath to avoid child support payments while it was worth a quarter of a billion dollars. And that's the Jesus Christ of our information age economy. This was not a kind man. And so in the tech community in the 90s, it was kind of rewarded to be, you know, you were a fighter, right? To be harsh. And I think a lot of that has changed for

the better. You realize, you know, just as you get older, you're just younger, you're selfish. And I think I'd gotten some early success. So I don't think I realized the extent to which luck played a role in that, but I've gotten better. I'm, you know, less of an asshole. What has allowed you to increase your self-awareness you just get older you just get not you know you just get older you realize I remember I had one moment and I was at a I was in a meeting uh but was run my own companies yeah before I joined NYU I remember like just nothing that big a deal but this guy was presenting and he was having some slides and I'm like I, I might go back. I'm like, your slides make no fucking sense. I'm like, just don't, don't get

us all in a room and present this garbage. Just kind of set it like that, those exact words. And he finished the presentation. And then we're all, you know, afterwards, and I went to the men's room and he was in the men's room and he was next to me at the urinal. And I saw his hands shaking. He was so rattled by the thing that he had like a small palsy or whatever you call it. And I remember thinking, I was finally getting to an age where I could start to be a little bit more self-aware

and kind of mind, what's the point of all this fucking success if you just make other people feel like shit? Like, what's the point? And I thought, why did I do that? And some of it was to communicate that this was unacceptable. And it was.

The data that this person was presenting was unacceptable. But it would have been just, but part of it was for me to take the opportunity to elevate my own stature by diminishing someone else's. And that's entirely wrong. And what you realize as you get older is that you don't need to diminish other people's status to get to the same point.

I should have taken him aside and said, come on, man, that data was, you can do better than that. This is what was wrong with it. This is how I think you should present the data. Realize that you're presenting to a group of people who are gonna notice that data contradicts the data on the next slide. And instead, my need to feel,

I don't know, important or whatever, put my own needs ahead of theirs. I think there's a lot of that. I don't think it's a unique attribute, but I'd like to think that I've starched most of that out of my professional life. I think you just get older. Hopefully you get kinder, you get more self-aware. But oh yeah, I look back on my career. There's a lot I'm not proud of. What are you still working on personally? Being present. Regret and upset about the past, anxiety about the future, take you so out of the present, trying to enjoy. My son's at boarding school. The most difficult thing about moving here is I come home, my boy's not there, my 15-year-old, that's really strange for me. You'll see when your kids

are around, they become a limb. Like when you're not around your kids you feel as if something's wrong i mean the first the first day away from them is amazing and then it gets awful you're like oh god this is wonderful i can sleep in you know i like i used to like business travel especially when they're babies babies are tough but now you feel like you're like you're like walking around without a limb it's just it's just weird and my son's in boarding school here. And so coming home and not having him home, it's just very, very strange. So when he was home yesterday, he's only home for a day and a half on the weekends, trying to be very in the moment, trying to be present. I have a tough time. One of my talents as an entrepreneur, I think, is that I'm always thinking about work

and focused on shit. So when I show up Monday morning, I've kind of got a head start because I'm thinking about problems. I'm thinking about stuff. But the problem is you're not that present. And it's very hard to balance those two because it's so competitive. I mean, I would imagine, I look around, I know your success. I would imagine you're constantly thinking about work, right? Thinking about new ways to improve things, people you can reach out to, emails you should send to encourage people, just constantly think about it. Once you have kids,

it's very hard to manage that balance because you wanna be present. So I'm trying to be present. Also, I'm trying to slow time down. Time is falling off a cliff for me. I have a chat group with my college friends. It was yesterday when we were in college. It's just flown by the last 30 years,

which means it's gonna go even faster and I'm gonna be 87. So trying to slow time down, trying to be more present. That's what I'm working on. And, uh, uh, you know, just trying to be kinder. I think, I think everyone should from day one, just think, okay, how can I be more kind? How do we slow time down? My, my, uh, my friend asked me the other day what my superpower would be. And that's what I said. I said, I wish I could pause time. And my, like, I think it's toxic. My answer was like, cause then I could get my work done and continue with, with my life. And then

maybe I could DJ and learn, you know, some other things, but my, I've always said that that would, that would be my chosen superpower, but how does one practically slow time down? So that 30 years doesn't fly past. So when you're a dad, one of the things you realize is you have this image that belief that your kids are going to be into World War II history and CrossFit. Those are the things I'm interested in. And what you find out is kids have their own interests. And if you want to be a good dad, you have to lean into their interests. Otherwise, you're just not going to have a very strong relationship with them because they're selfish. Kids are inherently selfish and they're like, oh, well, dad's really into World War II history. So I'll go to the British War Museum and I'll find it

fascinating. That doesn't happen. My kids, so yesterday I ended up at Life-Size Monopoly, which is this life-size monopoly game somewhere. And for me, that's the seventh ring of hell. That's just, that's just all. But what you try to do to slow time down is I immediately go into like, okay, just ignore the thing, you know, check your email, be a good dad, just do get through it, get through it. I find that you can slow time down by getting into stuff, like trying to like, so I really try and get in, get into life-size monopoly and engage with my child and be a little bit over the top about it. And when they do cheers, scream, try and just get really into things.

Because if you want time to pass, it will. It'll cooperate. But when you get really into stuff, even though you think it's stupid and cheesy and you're like, can't help but think, God, this is like Chinese water torture. I find that slows it down. I also find leaning into your emotions slows time down because it makes you more present. I didn't cry or laugh out loud from the ages of 30 to 44. For 14 years, I didn't cry once and I didn't laugh out loud. I lost the capacity to uncontrollably laugh and to cry. I just kind of forgot how to do either of those things.

And emotions are things you have to practice. So I remember the first time I started crying and the first time I really laughed out loud with friends, I thought, God, did both these things feel great? And I started getting really into those things and feeling guilt when I do something stupid or like trying to really embrace my emotions because that indicates what's important to you, what moves you, what inspires you, what upsets you, what pisses you off. And I find emotions, like real raw emotions when you register them and absorb them and like lean into the messy part of yourself, I find emotions, like real raw emotions, when you register them and absorb them and like lean into the messy part of yourself, I find that slows time down.

So getting into stuff and registering your emotions. And as a business person, you're taught to be a little bit stoic. You have this weird sense also as a man of masculinity that men don't feel their emotions, but you start forgetting what's important to you. You start forgetting what like things you're into. Like what do you find hilarious? What makes you well up with tears because you find it so moving? Without doing that stuff,

you forget what's important to you. You forget like you kind of lose your individualism. Uh, anyway, so there's, and you talked to Simon Sinek, there's a bunch of people who have a lot of means. Uh, those are my, those are my two tricks. In your book, the algebra of happiness, the third section is about health. Um, you spoke earlier about the importance of it. I've really recently over the last two years, I'd say learn the importance of health and make sure I work out pretty much every day. What are, why is health so important? You know, I've, I've been on my own journey to understand it. But one of the things you said was that the most common trait among CEOs is that they exercise regularly. And even that you said you've made comments about alcohol being bad for us. Did you, did you take time to learn that? I know you've been working

out since you were very, very young, but the overarching role of our health in everything. What have you learned about that and the importance of it? Oh, it's kind of where it all starts. I mean, this is not a rental, you know, it's not a dress rehearsal. Your body is it. I mean, you look, you, you look like an athlete. What do you do every day? What do you? Thank you. I'll clip that. Um, and I'll put that in my bio. Um, I do a mixture. So I train for an hour every day. Um, Jemima is in my fitness group. So about 90% of days a year we train. Um, yesterday was CrossFit. Uh, yeah, yesterday was CrossFit. So, yeah. So look, if you could do something that would make

you less depressed make you more likely to be successful broaden your selection set of mates i mean wouldn't wouldn't you want to take that drug every day it's called exercise we're happiest as a species in motion surrounded by others we've been hunting and gathering so the things you're going to remember in your life are usually not the CrossFit class, but walking around Rome with your family and your kids complaining, but being outside in some form of exercise with people you care about. So an exercise in feeling strong, I mean, it's been my antidepressant. If I don't, you know, I got here three, four days ago. I've only worked out once.

I can feel myself. I'm angrier. I'm not as nice. I don't feel as good about myself. I think for a lot of people, it is the easiest means to an antidepressant. It's the closest thing we have to a youth serum. You have this basically 24 by 7 security camera on in your brain trying to figure out if you're adding value. That's the bad news. The good news is it's got terrible

resolution and you can fool it. So if you're caring for other people, caregivers generally live longer because your brain will sense that you're caring for other people, you're social, you're touching people, you're concerned, and it releases a hormone that lets you stay alive. New mothers typically do not die. If you're exercising intensely, it fools the camera into believing that you're hunting prey or building housing. And it says, let's keep this person around longer. So it is a great antidepressant. It's a great use serum. I find you're just kinder, you're nicer, you're more confident. So, you know, again, the thing that the Fortune 500 CEOs have most in common, it's not the schools they went to, it's not even their ethnicity.

It is gender, only 483 of them are men. But more than any practice or attribute, it's that they work out four to five times plus a week. Physical fitness, again, it's one of my algorithms. You should not watch other people sweat for any longer than you sweat. And if you're watching other people sweat four hours a week and you're sweating one hour a week, you're in trouble. You not, you have to sweat more than you watch other people sweat. The other thing we have in common is our backgrounds in advertising and brand. You speak a lot about branding and advertising. I sat here with Rory Sutherland, and that was one of our real best performing episodes. So I didn't realize there was such

a demand from our audience in terms of practical advertising knowledge. He talked a lot about Apple and Tesla and the secrets there. How has the, the, the, the, the lands of advertising and a brand building a reputation changed in your lifetime. And what is the most important thing for brands to understand now,

or some of the important things for brands to understand now, if they are to be successful? Yeah. So my first job in business school, I started a company called Profit Brand Strategy. That's now about 500 people. Now it's just called Profit. And the basic notion was, it was based on the principles of my professor, my second year, David Ocker, who's considered the father of modern branding. And it was that the intangible associations with

a brand or set of products or services are the only sustainable advantage. That if you can wrap a set of products and services with these brand codes of masculinity, European elegance, youth, and then pound away at those associations using this incredibly cheap, efficient medium called broadcast advertising, you can take a marginal shoe, salty snack, marginal car, and get amazing margins on it. So that's been from the end of World War II to the introduction of Google in the 90s. The algorithm for creating massive shareholder wealth was find a mediocre product, wrap it in amazing brand codes and make people feel more patriotic or younger. Stuff the channel with it and print money. The P&Gs, the PepsiCo's of the world, the Coca-Colas, these are the economic titans of yesteryear.

The sun has passed midday on that because our weapons of diligence, whether it's Google or TripAdvisor or Amazon reviews, now gets us to the best product without the benefit of this weapon of diligence called brand. When I came to London, I used to stay at the Four Seasons in the Mandarin Oriental. Why? Because someone else was paying and they're always an eight. And then I went on TripAdvisor and I went on my social graph and I found out people love the Connett Hotel or people love the Ferndale Hotel. So I started staying at the Haymarket. Why? I like a place with a nice gym and I want to hang out with people who are younger and cooler than me. So I started staying in boutique hotels. So all of a sudden, product became the bomb again. And then your ability to embrace these new mediums around social became more important than broadcast advertising. So the traditional

metrics of branding, the traditional vehicles for branding, a brand identity and broadcast advertising that I've been preaching in brand strategy, the sun has passed midday. If you look at my curriculum and the majority of curriculums in marketing departments, you could argue that we're just training people to go to work at Unilever or General Mills and be laid off 24 months later. Branding has become much more about innovation

and actual product quality. Now that extends into how you discover the product, how you absorb the product, the community around it. But Tesla is a better product. Apple used to be an underpowered product with a great brand. Now it's a great brand with a superior product. So Airbnb is a much better product. Google is 10x better than what was there before it. So supply chain, design, the way you absorb the product, its ease of use, you know, it's moved from kind of what you call a brand economy to, for lack of a better term,

an innovation economy. So rather than taking classes on advertising, I say take classes on supply chain or analytics or really understand industrial design, you know, there was a general feeling that all product quality had maxed out. And then the internet came along and unlocked all this product innovation. So cars, they felt it hit kind of a peak in terms of product quality. And then all of a sudden with the internet and GPS, you could tune a car up wirelessly. You can unlock the doors. There was all kinds of crazy things you could do with it in addition to EV. I mean, there's just been so much actual innovation around the product. And what are the most valuable companies in the world have in common? They either spend no money on advertising or they're spending less. Apple's

the strongest brand in the world, at least a consumer brand. I would argue the strongest brands in the world are universities. But it's reallocated $6 or $7 billion out of broadcast advertising into its channel, into stores. It built 550 templates for the brand. And I think of that as almost part of the product. My 12-year-old and I were bored yesterday, so we went to the Apple store. So that's kind of consuming the product and i end up buying screen savers and new cases that i'm sure 90 points of gross margin that i could find to finac or best buy or someone for less money but we want to be in that store in that environment so it's it's moving out of pre-purchase broadcast advertising into the distribution channel and into innovation. But the traditional norms of

marketing or branding as I taught it, that shit's over. Don Draper has been drawn and quartered. If you're watching a lot of advertising, it means your life hasn't worked out. The majority of people who are technically literate or wealthy can avoid 80, 90% of advertising now. They watch Netflix, they subscribe to Spotify, they live in cities where they have local officials that demand you can't see a billboard from a park. So the advertising is a tax on the poor and the technologically illiterate.

So it's moved to more distribution and innovation. But for God's sakes, don't avoid falling into the trap of thinking that the masters of the universe are branders or advertisers. If they are innovators, then how does one make themselves or their team more innovative? This is the question I get asked all the time when I speak at conferences or to businesses as well. You know, how do we make our 500 people in our company innovate? Because you'll see the CEO standing, you know, in front of the board meeting or the all hands

and say, we need to be more innovative. Yeah, what does that mean, right? That's fuck all. We all know that. But by design, how do we create an innovative mindset ourselves or innovative teams? That's a tough one. I don't consider myself an expert on culture, although it's clearly out there.

Like I think of HBO. HBO, if there's a show that people are talking about, I don't know if the same is true, but in the US, if there's a show people are talking about the water cooler, it's euphoria, it's succession. It's generally an hbo show and they have about a third of the budget of some of the other streaming networks so there's something about that culture where they're able to come up with kind of breakthrough creative some companies just seem to do that time and time again agreed and so it's a culture

thing at the heart of it even apple you know yeah especially in the era of Steve Jobs, they seem to take some unbelievably scary bets that paid off. So obviously a lot of them don't, some of them don't, but Amazon's the same. AWS, the Kindle. 100%. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, you know, there's some basics. It's a willingness to fail, to take big bets, to reward people for taking risks. I think an external viewpoint that's constantly benchmarking other companies. I mean, my last from L2, essentially what we did was we went out and benchmarked the best practices of every company in social e-commerce payments, and then came in and said, okay, Unilever, okay, Nike, what can you learn from everyone from Adidas to Tata Motors?

Like, what are they doing that's really interesting? So having an external viewpoint, a willingness to take big bets, I also think holding people accountable. Founder-led businesses seem to be much more innovative. Obviously, I think they often fail quicker as well, but they seem to have a higher risk appetite than founder-led businesses. We have a closing tradition on this podcast. All right. where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest they don't know who they're leaving it for and i don't get to read it until i open the book um

the question that's been left for you okay do i get to know who left it you don't I don't okay what is your biggest regret personally and if you could go back what would you do differently it's funny it's the questions that are obvious are the hardest my biggest regret personally I wish I had been kinder from an earlier age. I think it's good for the world. I think it makes me feel more masculine. It makes me feel more successful to be kind. And I didn't stumble upon that. I wish I'd come to that realization sooner, that to be generous, to be loving, to be, you know, Cindy Gallup, a friend of mine says that the most wasted resource is good intentions.

I wish my good intentions had, I was more ready, more confident to articulate the kind thoughts I had about others and to articulate them with more ease. I've thought good things about other people. I've wanted to do good things for a long time, but I didn't have the confidence or the discipline to either say them or do them. I wish I'd had that confidence earlier because the majority of us are good people. The majority of us admire other people. The majority of us love

other people. And we don't want to articulate it. I think especially men, because we're worried that saying I admire you or, you know, you're just such a handsome young buff man who's acquired so much success at a young age. I'm kind of like trying to figure out, I'd love to know, like, how did you do all this at such a young age? Saying that is embarrassing for a man. There's this feeling among men that me saying that makes me less successful and masculine. Like it's a zero sum game. And what you realize as you get older is that is, that is how you feel strong and how you feel kind. I wish I'd figured that out earlier. I wish I'd been more forthcoming with my positive emotions. Does that end up making us miserable personally?

So if I held that kind of, it's almost a form of resentment, isn't it? I think we all have it. I think when Justin Bieber came onto the scene and I looked over and there was this like 14 year old that had all the women and he was beautiful and he was selling out these arenas. I'm thinking, fuck it, this guy. Well, Schadenfreude.

I mean, it's just resentment of other people's success. I think that's different. I think Justin Bieber warrants some hate. For sure, but the reason I was hating on him was purely jealousy. Fair enough. But my sense is you seem pretty self-actualized at your age. I was at the age of 30 as an entrepreneur. If my team was doing a great job and there was a great shot, I rewarded them at the end of the year with a bonus. As you get older, what you realize is young people need watering. It doesn't matter how successful they are.

It doesn't matter how much money they're making. When you say, I sent a text this morning. My prop G has this new thing called, we have something called a markets podcast, which is focused on the markets. The team did such an amazing job with the sound edits today. And it's a 24 year old. It's a 24 year old doing this shit. And she has such a feel. Her name's Claire Miller. She has such a feel for how to integrate sound and music and knows when to fade it in and fade it out. And I immediately

register that. And I think, oh, me registering that is really good for her because I'm the boss. Well, why wouldn't you pull out your phone and say your integration of sound here is so striking and your talent is so ahead of where you are? And I did that. And I know when she wakes up this morning and gets that text message,

it's just gonna make her morning.'s just going to make her morning. It's just going to make her morning. 20 years ago, I didn't think to do that. Why? I don't know. I just didn't do it. Just didn't, I don't know, selfish. Didn't want to give up that.

Again, saw it as somewhat of lazy, not kind. I don't know. Is there an element of thinking that if you give the compliment, then someone can become complacent or they can become, they might not strive. As hard, maybe. I don't know. I saw my job as a CEO back when was all over everybody all of the time. I mean, just all the time. And I'm still like that. I'm not as bad. I am a little bit as well, to be fair. And look, you can do that and still be kind. I was on a panel with other CEOs

and they asked, what is your management philosophy? And this one woman who runs a very successful startup said, it's putting people in the role to succeed. And the other person said, it's putting people in the role to succeed. And the other one, and the other person said, it's helping people find their true self, finding what they're really passionate about. And then it came to me like, I'm all fucking over everybody all of the fucking time. And everything, you know, I just went, darn, I don't know how else to do it. I'm just all over. And I realized maybe that's why I've never been able to grow a billion dollar business. Cause I'm just too, I don't want to say in the weeds. I do give

people, uh, I think a decent amount of latitude, but I don't know how else to do it just to, you know, kind of be all over everything all of the time. Uh, I don't, maybe that's why, again, I don't, I'm not running a multi-billion dollar franchise. I can relate. I can relate. I can relate to that a lot, but that's a conversation for another time, I guess, because it's not as much about me, but thank you, Scott, for your time and your wisdom. I followed you for some time and I remember going out to Bali a couple of years ago, grabbing the book in the airport when I was off to write my own book. So I, your book was a source of inspiration for me. I remember reading it on my desk there in Ubud. And that's why I was surprised it wasn't behind me today, but I guess

it's upstairs. And your, your bullshit free approach to sharing yourself and your ideas is incredibly important. I think we've seen a sort of a decline in a willingness to be both vulnerable and brutally honest about our perspectives. And it doesn't mean our perspectives are always correct, but the collision of two ideas that are honest, I think is how we ultimately lead to progress. So I love that. And that's why we ultimately have this podcast. Your new book, Adrift America in 100 Charts is out now. Yep. Why did you write that book? Of all the things you, you know, you know so much about so many things and you talk about so many topics. Why that book? I'm fascinated with the idea of a

nation and connective tissue. I feel very patriotic as I get older, I'm more grateful for my blessings. And one of my blessings I talked about was being born in America. And I wanted, I love charts. We've been communicating with words since the alphabet for 1500 years, but we've been communicating with images, whether it was reading them off the cave walls or the walls of caves or looking at the height of the sun in the sky for tens of thousands. So I've always been really drawn to charts. We can process information six to 60 times faster when it's visual. So I thought, how can I create a narrative around what ails America and what are some of the solutions with charts? So it's a chart and then a narrative, second chart and a narrative all grouped into themes. And also I just want to write a book every 12 to 15 months.

I feel like it's the hardest thing I do, but I feel like it keeps me sort of young. And some of those narratives are conversations we've had today, but explained in more context. And all of your books have been important. For me, it's because of the way that you write. It's not just the content itself, but it's writing in such an accessible way, which can make a very complicated theme

be accessible to someone like me, who is not, I don't consider myself to be an intellectual in any capacity. And thank you for your time today. It's a real stroke of luck that you now live in London and you're able to be here and do this. And I feel very honored that you came. So thank you. I appreciate that. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you.