The Jordan Harbinger Show - 473: Scott Galloway | From Crisis to Opportunity Post Corona

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) cohosts Pivot with Kara Swisher, publishes the No Mercy/No Malice newsletter, is a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, and is the author of Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity. What We Discuss with Scott Galloway: How the pandemic has accelerated changes already in the making: it only took 40 weeks to lose the jobs that it took 20 years to create, and only eight weeks for e-commerce to experience a decade's worth of growth. The industries most poised to thrive in the post-pandemic world. Why it's never been easier to become a billionaire, and it's never been harder to become a millionaire. How education will change as a result of pandemic upheaval and the technology created to match its demand -- likely for the better. How to make sure these dramatic changes work for you instead of against you. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/473 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. I think a decent exercise for any company and any individual is look at the three biggest trends in your industry, look at the three biggest trends in your life, and take them out 10 years. If you're struggling with mental illness or you have signs of early mental illness, I think the pandemic has accelerated that trend 10 years. I think if you're in bad shape and you're not eating well or you're drinking a little bit more or you started drinking a little bit more, becoming a little bit more. You know, that one glass of wine is turned into two glasses of wine. I think if your relationship is unhealthy, take every. everything out 10 years and say, shit, am I here right now? The accelerant component of this pandemic is remarkable, just remarkable, what it's done.

In almost every trend in every industry, the slope, whether it's up or down, is just increased dramatically. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional journalist-turned poker champion, former cult member, or rocket scientists, each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works

and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we now have episodes starter packs. These are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on this show. Just visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started. That's always appreciated. That's how we grow. So I'm counting on you. Spread the word here, folks. Today, Professor Scott Galloway returns to the show by popular demand. He was on the show a few years

back laying down some real talk about job skills, career moves, and what it takes to become a part of the 1% here in the United States, as well as stay a happy slash sane person while doing it, or at least the top 10%. Maybe don't quite get to the 1%. We get to the top 10. Are we all right with that? Today, we're still bringing that timely yet timeless wisdom and focusing on what the world and the workplace will look like

post-COVID, post-pandemic here. During the pandemic, lower earners got laid off at huge rates. Only 13% of earners over $100,000 a year got laid off. So really, as Scott says on the show, if you're in that top 10%, that 1%, you're living your best life right now. It took 20 years to create the jobs we lost in 40 weeks in 2020. And many folks in Gen Z are moved back in with their parents.

Lower income folks fight in our wars that are more likely to get COVID because they're in service jobs, et cetera. And now, whether the United States is headed for a Hunger Games future or something brighter depends on the path we take now. It's never been easier to become a billionaire and it's never been harder to become a millionaire. There's something wrong with that, right? Today is a sobering discussion about the wealth gap, the education gap, and what it's going to take for our country and for you as listeners to make sure you are on the winning side of this thing. You will enjoy this episode as Scott Galloway is consistently popular here on the show.

I had a blast with this one. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all of these great thinkers and creators, authors, every single week, it's all about the network. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I'll get you in that top 1% of networkers at least. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

Now, here's Scott Galloway. So we did our previous couple of shows or previous show back in 2019. And back then, you and I were talking about the future of work and do you need to move in order to get to the right place to do work. And the pandemic, coronavirus has changed. I want to be specific, coronavirus, because who knows? By the time people are listening to this, they'll be like, which pandemic? Hopefully not.

But the coronavirus pandemic changed a hell of a lot since you wrote the algebra of happiness, which was early 2019, I think, if memory serves. Yeah, that's about right. You mentioned that the pandemic will accelerate changes already in the making. Yeah. And the first example in the book is that e-commerce has grown a decade in eight weeks, and it won't go backwards. That is believable, but also interesting that you don't think.

think people are just going to jump back to shopping. And I'm curious why, because I personally hate shopping, so I'm like the worst data point for this. You know, I've been buying things online since they were selling things online. And I plan to do only that. But I don't know if everyone's like that. Yeah. So first off, COVID-19's kind of enduring feature will be as an accelerant, not a change agent. Not a whole lot has changed. It's just dramatically accelerated. So you mentioned e-commerce. But there's others. Home delivery of grocery was accelerating. It leapt six years. The number of people between the age of 18 and 30 living at home with their parents has been increasing. It's leapt forward a decade. Work from home is leapt forward 20 years. Government

spending has increased 24 years. And hopefully it'll come back. We won't need the kind of stimulus. And we can't afford the kind of stimulus. We've been pumping into the economy. It's an interesting exercise. Take the three biggest trends in your business. I also think it's interesting to take the three biggest trends in your personal life. And look at the slope of the trajectory of the change. And then take that same slope in that line out a decade and ask yourself, are we here now? And are we, am I personally and professionally prepared for this? There's also some really unfortunate things. Our economy has gone from a dysfunctional economy to a dystopian economy.

We knew there was income inequality. It has massively accelerated. If Tesla was doing well and stock was performing, now it's up 800%. Companies that were seen as winners are now Uber winners. Companies that were struggling have been kicked in the gut. repeatedly. So this thing is really, it really is an accelerant. As it relates to e-commerce, I think you might see a sugar-high surge once we get to hurt immunity back to physical stores. But stores are totally reconfiguring. I'm going on the board of Panera bread. Do you know Panera?

I do. Yeah, I usually never order anything with bread there, but yeah, I know the place. Yeah. Yeah. So they're reconfiguring through the pandemic, 85% of their business now is off-premise, meaning click and collect or delivery or catering or people who ordered online, whatever it might be. And they are reconfiguring their store footprint, reconfiguring their supply chain, their competencies, their capital investments. And sure, it'll go back. More people will be in the cafes, once it's safe to be back in the cafes. It really is a tectonic shift, and people have adopted new consumer behaviors. You're going to see, think about this, Jordan. 99% of the people who contracted, endured, and developed antibodies for the novel coronavirus likely never stepped into a doctor's office, much less a hospital. So you have potentially a life-threatening illness or something that can't evolve into a life-threatening illness, and the majority, the vast majority of people never went to the doctor's office.

And so what has this done? It's gotten us used to the notion that health care can be delivered to a certain extent over a smartphone, over a speaker, over a phone, through a remote pulse oxygenator, whatever, it's the thing that you found your finger. Yeah, the blood oxygen meter, the little finger laser. I don't really know exactly, yeah. Whatever it is, the thing you put on your finger. And so that has changed, consumer behaviors has changed so dramatically. In our business, I don't know, do you speak, do you ever, do you get paid to speak? Yeah, I do occasionally, I don't market myself that much as such, but yeah, like once a month

I'll do some sort of paid speaking. Well, actually, no, sorry, every week, but usually there's smaller engagements and then a big engagement, maybe every month. Yeah, but I kind of, I'm digging the Zoom. paid Zoom talk. I'll tell you that. Well, that's exactly right. So what's changed there? So I do a lot of that. And I either charge a crazy amount of money or I charge zero. If it's a nonprofit and I try and keep an equivalent amount, anyways, enough virtue signaling. But basically you write books and the way you monetize books is through speaking. And a year ago, I used to get paid X and I'd get on a plane to

go to the Radisson, Phoenician, and Scottsdale, Arizona. And it would take me two days. I'd get there the night before in the morning, the CEO of the company or somebody would want to have breakfast, you go get miced, you do your thing, you go back to the airport, your flight's canceled, and it's a day and a half tour, if you will. Nobody would pay you to do a remote speaking engagement. They just wouldn't, or I didn't, I didn't tap into the market. Now, I only get 0.5x. The cost you can charge has come way down, but I literally go into my studio. I have a tech guy, and it's about an hour and a half total. So my total revenue, and because the cost had come down 50%, the elasticity is kicked in and there's much greater demand. To a certain extent, it's a metaphor for what's going on in

the economy. There's been a dispersion of the value. People have realized, okay, let's go find who we think is the appropriate speaker of our event. And if he or she lives in Del Rey, Florida, and we're having an event in Sydney, it's the friction and the costs there are no longer as prohibitive. And it used to cost us three or four X if he or she would do it. Now it costs a fraction of that in terms of friction and economic costs. And so the best speakers are the people who are in the most demand, their revenues have gone up two or threefold because their demand has gone up six to eightfold because they're charging half as much, whereas the tier two players are getting crushed. So there's kind of a flight to quality and increased consolidation, a dispersion of value. But you're seeing HQ be dispersed. Work from home was a big trend. And it was growing four or six percent a year. It's accelerated a decade. The building I used to work in and then I'll shut up. The 1251 Avenue, America is my first job, 51st and 6th Avenue in. Yeah, wait, I used to work in there. Wait, is that the McGraw Hill building or is that just... Exactly right. Yeah, I used to work in there. It used to be the Exxon building. But anyways, which tells you what's happened to the world. Pretty soon will be the Google building. But anyways, they track how many people are in the building for security purposes. And on an average weekday, there's 8,500 people, and that's going to come back. But it's not coming back to 8,500. And people tend to talk in binary terms as a firm either going to work traditionally or all from home. And no, it's going to be in between. They're going to be a lot more comfortable with somebody saying, you know what, I can't afford to live close to headquarters a man.

Manhattan. I have to commute an hour and a half each way. Is it cool if I work from home Thursday and Friday? Or I have my kid on Friday as my kid gets out of school early on noon. Is it okay if I work from home on Friday? And your superiors, your colleagues, your boss and yourself are going to be much more comfortable with spending a lot more time at home. So what are you going to see? You're going to see the $12 trillion asset class, which is commercial real estate, basically office buildings, leak a ton of value to residential. So you're going to see office streets decline in value and you're going to see everything from lumber prices to residential housing prices to Sonos to Sub-Zero to William Sonoma to restoration hardware absolutely skyrocketed. So we're saying just an acceleration

of current trends and what I'd call a reshuffling of stakeholder value. When we talked about the algebra of happiness, we were talking about income and salaries. And you'd said one of the most important things people can do is move to cities. And I'm assuming, or I'm wondering, I guess I should say, has that opinion changed? Yeah. Okay, so broad brush, no. The death of cities has been greatly exaggerated, and that is cities are still a fantastic place to bump off of people to make connections, to meet the most creative people in the world, to find a mate. It's the place for the most talented people spend their youth, typically, typically, not always, but typically. And I always say to young people, get to a city while before you have dogs and a spouse, because that stuff gets very

expensive and it's hard to stay in a city. But if you look at some of the most forward-leaning companies in the world, whether it's Amazon or Google or Facebook, they're actually increasing the amount of space they're leasing in New York. Because I think the secret sauce for most what I'll call information economy firms is their ability to attract the best and brightest young people. The dirty secret I think of companies is that the highest ROI asset in the company is an investment in organic intelligence or even lobbying or technology. The highest ROI you get on any investment is if you can attract a really talented 25-year-old because you can pay them 80 grand. They work around the clock. They're super smart. And they're 80% as good is the 40-year-old BP.

You're paying a quarter of a million dollars. So show me your six, an average half-dozen people under the age of 30 in your company. And I'll tell you how the company is doing. So the key is to attract that best human capital or that best asset class. And 25-year-olds, if you can build what Google and Facebook are building, which is effectively Xan, do in New York, London, Sydney, the best cities in the world. And you say to a 24-year-old double-e from MIT, hey, would you like to come hang out in New York for two or three years and we'll get you an apartment, concierge service, you can bring your dog to work. We have beer blasts. At noon, we have lunch, free lunch, and you get to see Malcolm Gladwell speak. They just don't say no.

And also just the efficiency of being in a city. So bottom line is, I'm very, very bullish on cities. Now, there's some situations. Cities are like a product. San Francisco is a product that is expensive but bad. It's just priced itself. It's a poorly run city. You see homeless veterans on the street that are severely mentally ill. It is really rattling. And the taxes are incredibly high. I mean, it's expensive but bad would be the way to categorize it. There's a huge migration more generally that can be just described as sunshine and low taxes. Texas and Florida are just sucking the wealth, if you will, are people who are mobile out of California in the Northeast. So Sanford is going to suffer, but they're not leaving Sanford.

Francisco to move to Modesto or to move to Bend, Oregon, they're going, they're moving to Austin or they're moving to Miami. So I would say young people get certified and get to a city because certification is the way you communicate that you have skills. It's a LinkedIn world and people want to evaluate you digitally before you even have an opportunity to prove yourself in 3D and organically. And unfortunately, certification is still incredibly important in a society. And the second thing is get to a city because when you're in a city, you're playing tennis against the best players in the world. And when you play against someone better than you, your game just naturally rises. You know, I find that to be true in business as well.

Someone said, like, Jordan, you've really improved in the last few years to what do you attribute this, or where they'll say, hey, the show's really grown or the topics have really evolved, whatever it is, whether it's a compliment or something along those lines. I can never say, well, I've worked a lot on my XYZ. It's always, well, you know, I noticed that the podcast space was getting really crowded and some really good people are coming in. You got Scott Galloway with his 10 different podcasts. Go on.

I have to compete with that. Go on. It really was kind of like, I didn't think before that I was resting on any laurels or being lazy or anything like that. And I still don't think I was. But there's just something about looking at somebody who's either nipping at your heels, not that you're doing that, or is just ahead of you or as farther ahead of you than you could ever be like Joe Rogan.

And you go, well, hell, if that's the potential of this niche, I might not get to Joe Rogan cash me out for $200 million on Spotify, but I should be doing a little bit more than I am now. And if I don't, then this 25-year-old who's kind of just behind me but has the right idea, he's going to lap me and I'm going to wake up one day and be like, what happened to my spot. So I can see that happening. If that's happening digitally, it's definitely happening when the guy's in the office next to you or when the girl's a floor below you and is working on a project and she's the boss, right? That's a wake-up call that you can't get by just sort of imagining that it exists. You kind of have to be faced with it. Yeah, competition is the basis of evolutionary progress, and it's the basis of one of the keys to capitalism. And unfortunately, I think, and this is bridging into a different topic, but I think a lot of companies get to a point where they spend the majority of their innovation or kind of senior leadership focusing on maintaining their monopoly position so they don't have to compete, instead of the marketplace coming in or regulars coming in, forcing them to compete such that they innovate. The competition, whether it's lions fighting over a certain region of the plains. I just came back from safari, so I'm thinking about animals. But competition is an incredible unlock for value. Pretty basic. And now cities are competing. It'll be interesting to see what happens to different states. I think there's going to be a budget crisis in California, New York, Illinois. I can personally name, gosh, tens of millions of dollars

in tax revenue that New York has lost to Florida. So it's going to be super interesting what happens. Yeah, I do worry about that. As somebody who lives in California, is building a house. You know, we have so many people that come and rent from us or rent from our family, neighbors, whatever, because they work at, I don't even know, Hewlett, Packard, or whatever it is, or Oracle, maybe Oracle's up in the city. But companies like that, Apple, especially around here in San Jose, and I'm like, oh, geez, if all these people are leaving, who's going to come and replace them? Is it going to affect the property values? It's kind of hard to tell because you still do have tons of people coming into work in Silicon Valley. But if there's

enough of a drain and a bunch of these companies end up moving to Austin or Miami, it's definitely going to take a toll. I don't think the place is going to die or anything because you'll just end up with younger people, but younger people don't have $8,000 a month to spend on rent. They just don't. That's what Hewlett-Packard employees have to spend. So I'm bearish over kind of what I'll call the medium term for San Francisco, but San Francisco still has this incredible culture. It's arguably the most beautiful city in the United States. And there's some very big prosperous companies that are still going to stay there. Apple's not moving. Google's not moving. Facebook's not moving. Salesforce, as far as I know, doesn't have any plans to move. What I do think you'll see,

though, I think a city like New York and I'm biased. I went to graduate school in San Francisco and lived there for a decade, but I lived in New York for a decade. I think New York is going to bounce back faster because I think the city is better run, even though our mayor right now, it's a bit of a disaster, but it is an incredible place and exceptionally efficient. But what this kind of creative destruction, if you will, is good for people your generation. Because if all of a sudden, New York real estate in Brooklyn, quote unquote, crashes from 1,500 bucks a square foot to 800, that's not the worst thing in the world. Sure, the people that own Brooklyn real estate get hurt right now. But our collective approach to this, and it's a dangerous mentality, and I feel this

is kind of the motive behind everything we do, including the stimulus, the media. Everybody talks about the tragedy of capital destruction. And the reality is the reason I'm financially secure is because in 2008, the market's crashed and I was able to buy Apple at $120 a share instead of 500, and now it's whatever it's at, so 3,000. So market correction or market crashes are obviously damaging to the people who own the assets, specifically older people, but they're also a huge opportunity for younger people. So when that restaurant goes out of business that for some reason we've fallen in love with and have issued $750 billion in PPE to keep the restaurants open, if that restaurant goes out of business, that means that the space goes,

down in value. And then a 26-year-old graduate of the Culinary Academy from Sonoma can pursue her dream of opening a restaurant. So capitalism and a transfer of wealth or an evolution of wealth or opportunity for young people, one of the keys to that is you have to let the winds of creative destruction blow. And America right now is really all about economically, fiscally, the media. It's all about one thing. It used to be about helping younger people get rich. Now it's about keeping older, rich people rich or richer. And if you look at people under the age of 40, their total percentage of the wealth in the United States has fallen from 19% to 9% in the last 40 years or 30 years. It's no wonder that young people are just pissed off. For the

first time in our nation's history, a 30-year-old isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at 30. And when that breaks down, that's kind of the basis of the compact in our society. If I play by the rules, if I work hard, if I'm a good citizen, if I'm a good person, then I'm going to do better than my parents. That's just sort of the basic deal you have with a society. And when that breaks down, there's just a ton of shame. The parents are ashamed and embarrassed. The kid is ashamed and embarrassed. And that is happening all across America.

And it's manifesting itself or that rage and that shame is manifesting in very strange ways. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Scott Gallow, We'll be right back. Now back to Scott Galloway on the Jordan Harbinger show. I get letters all the time from people that say like, hey, what am I doing wrong? How can I get ahead? I'm a doctor and I have two roommates and I drive a Prius. But I have, you know, $300,000 in debt from medical school because I'm a, I don't know,

you know, some kind of specialty that required that amount of education. And it's going to take me another 11 years to pay it at the current rate. But the guy's like 37. You know, he's not going to really be making that much money and be in the black until he's pushing 50. And he's like, then what? I got to work. And then I'm going to start saving for retirement. Like, I'm screwed.

What do I do? And it's kind of depressing because that's a doctor. It's not somebody who just got out of prison and lost 10 years of their life. It's not somebody who had a career jaunt that was unsuccessful and the concentration doesn't exist anymore or isn't of value anymore or got automated away. he's a freaking doctor, you know, like this is, that, that scares me to see things like that. So he'll be fine. What I generally find with doctors is they anchor off the high point. Usually a lot of times, something like 50% of dentists, their dads are dentists.

I think a lot of doctors, their parents are doctors. And everybody in their profession anchors off the salad days. So doctors remember in the 1980s, doctors got to work three or four days a week and had the biggest house on the block. That's no longer the case. But your buddy, your friend, is going to be just fine. Those skills are still really in demand, always going to make a good living, if not a great living. The person I'm most worried about is the 25-year-old that maybe didn't get accepted into a great school because great schools are now drunk on luxury and brag about turning away 80, 85, 90 percent of their applicants,

which in my mind is just totally morally corrupt. That's tantamount to the head of a housing shelter, bragging that he or she turned away 90 percent of the people that showed up last night. They end up at a second-tier school. We've exploded tuition. We have a cartel, cartel pricing. So you're paying for a Mercedes, you're paying a Mercedes price for a Hyundai. They end up with a lot of student debt, not the same prestige or certification they would have gotten at a school that I was able to get into. When I applied to UCLA, the administrator was 60%. Now it's 12%. So that means someone much better than me cannot get into UCLA today. They end up with a lot of debt. They end up in a pandemic where they don't have the opportunity to pursue job opportunities. Their rent as a percentage of their income is higher. Their taxes as a percentage of their income is higher. their education is exploded. To put it simply, our nation has said to everyone under the age of 40, fuck you. I want mine. I'm rich. I want to stay rich. And if you look at tax policy, why do I get to

write off the interest on the loan against my house? Who owns houses? Old rich people. Who rents? Young people. Oh, but we've decided my payment on my house is tax deductible. Capital gains is 20% versus 38% of the top income group. if some 28-year-old is killing it and making $100 grand a year, working his or her ass off, selling homes or selling cars, he or she pays 37% tax rate. But when I sell stocks, I pay 20 or 23%. Who owns assets? Older rich people.

Who makes money through sweat, younger people. Everything we do is nothing but a subtle transfer of wealth from young people to old people. The biggest social programs in America, social security. trillion dollars, who is the wealthiest cohort in America, seniors. And Social Security is a fantastic program. It took senior poverty from 38% down to 11%, but shouldn't it be targeted for God's sakes? And you want to talk about a cohort that's been set back by the pandemic. The number of women in the workplace has regressed 30 years. We've taken women back to the 80s because when you have remote learning, we've essentially dispersed learning to the home with remote learning

because a lot of schools are closed. And it's sexist to say, but it's true. It falls. It on the mom. It's the mom sitting next to the eight-year-old trying to get him or her through their math class on a goddamn iPad and keep them engaged and make sure they don't come off the rails. So the mom stays at home. And what if you're a single mom? You got to leave the workforce. And what happens when you need to go back to the workforce? So there's actually this wonderful movement called Marshall Plan for Moms being run by the woman who started girls who code. And I think it's a fantastic idea. But everything we didn't like about our society. income inequality, systemic racism, poor health of the poor. All of these things have gone from rashes to full-blown flesh-eating diseases. There's huge opportunities coming out of this, but we really have to take a hard look in the mirror. And unfortunately, because we're all segregating into our homes, we don't see, you know, we're all dispersing into our homes. And the cousin of dispersion is segregation. And when we're not commuting to work, Jordan, we don't see the homeless vet on the off ramp. When we're not going into restaurants, we don't

see the single mom bringing us our food working our ass off. You know, when we're not at movie theaters or malls, we don't see people from different ethnicities and demographic groups. And the research shows when you don't interact with people from other demographic backgrounds, when that population starts growing, you resent them. Whereas when you go to school with them, when you interact with them, when you're at the water cooler with them at work, you empathize with them. And so I worry we're headed to a very dark place in the society. There's so much rage, so much divisiveness. And as a society and as an economy, we've decided that collectively, our job isn't to get, give everyone a shot at being in the top 1%. It feels like our collective

job has become, how do we turn the 1% into billionaires? How do we take the children of rich people and freakishly remarkable people and they're out there and turn them into billionaires? And I feel as if just in general, we need to fall back in love with the unremarkables. I don't know about you. I was unremarkable growing up. tell me about it. I don't say that as a humble brag. I didn't have good grades, but I didn't test well either. But the University of California said you're a native son of California, a single immigrant mother, lived and died of secretary, we're going to give you a shot. And I rewarded them with a GPA at a UCLA of 2.27. That's how I said thank you. And then you know what happened? Berkeley let me into graduate school. Can you believe that?

And then I got my shit together at about the age of 27, and I've done okay. But I wasn't some Freakishly remarkable kid at 17 that had built Wells in Africa and had a pharmaceutical patent and was the captain of the lacrosse team because that's what you got to be right now to get into UCLA. It's crazy. I remember getting, I got waitless of it at Michigan. I ended up sort of finagling my way almost into law school. It was underqualified. And back then, that was kind of a miracle. And now it just doesn't even seem to happen. I looked at the scores when I applied to school in 2004, to law school, I should say, in 2004. They were insanely high for the University of Michigan.

I got into a bunch of different law schools, not that one. And like I said, I ended up going to Michigan after all. But now I look at it and I go, holy, you really do have to be like the president of the young Republicans and a foreign exchange student and the captain of the, like you said, the lacrosse team. And you also have to have your own nonprofit that you registered at some point in middle school funded by the sticker company that you founded in third grade, or you just have no chance in hell of even being remotely considered for something like this, which is a shame because I, again, like you, I look back at myself as a late bloomer, maybe you could call it, and not knowing that I

was cut out to run my own business and just thinking I was this unemployable kind of turd and not being totally convinced that that's today that that's not necessarily the case. But like, there's so many people out there who are never even going to get a chance because the only school they got into is like Duncan Donuts University, you know, in rural Michigan. And they either don't want to or can't get there or something along those lines. And it still costs $20,000 a year. Yeah. So people brag, how many times you hear, I could never get into the school I went to if I applied now. And they say that with a little twinkle in their eye and they're kind of proud of it. And guess what? That means your kid isn't getting in. Yeah. And decreasing admissions rates are, again, nothing but a transfer of wealth from

the poor to the rich and the young to the old, because in our society, education is still a fantastic upward lubricant. And right now, because admissions rates have gone from 60% down to 12% at UCLA and had a subsequent decline at almost every prestigious university, we take in two cohorts. One, the children or bridge people who can access the industrial test complex, have fantastic resources to get them through school, maybe know somebody who can nudge somebody. I see it happening to me. Most of my friends do really well. I can write them letters of rec. It just, you see how it happens one nudge at a time. When I was applying to school, my mom didn't know anybody. Anyways, and then two, the other cohort that helps us smear Vaseline over the lens of what is turned from a meritocracy to a caste system is we

led in these freakishly remarkable kids from middle and lower income schools. And there's some good stories here. If you're an amazing kid from the inner city, Harvard will find you and you can find Harvard. But most of us aren't remarkable. And I feel as if in general we need to schools, and I'm part of the problem, the head of the Harvard admissions, of a heart admission says we could have doubled our freshman class and not sacrifice inequality. And the question is, well, when you have an endowment that's the GDP of El Salvador, why aren't you, boss? So I believe that universities who are growing their endowment faster than they're growing their admissions or growing their freshman seats. I think they should be taxed as private enterprises. They're no longer educators. They're hedge funds educating the

children of their investors. So we've lost this script in education, I believe. I think our tax policy is totally bass-acquard and is asking up-and-coming middle-class kids to support the already rich. This stimulus package, I think, was cloud cover to basically transfer more wealth from the poor to the rich. We throw some loaves and some circuses out the poor. Unemployment insurance is really important. Food bank's really important. But four out of five people say they're not going to spend their stimulus check, which means they don't need it. They don't need it. So what do they do with that money? They put it in the bank or they put it in the market. So we have record low interest rates. We have money going into the market. So the stock market has skyrocketed record highs.

Residential real estate, because interest rates are so low, has skyrocketed record highs. And Jordan, who owns 90% by gross dollar volume of the residential real estate and stocks in the U.S.? Yeah, it's going to be the 1%. The top 1%. Yeah. So we have just created this upward spiral of income inequality and basically said, and by the way, even worse, it's financed with debt. So we basically said to the young and the unborn, you know what?

We're going to max out your credit card so we can have not only just a champagne party, but we want a champagne and cocaine party. This is not sustainable. And you're seeing it manifests itself in all sorts of ways. Whenever we reach these levels of income inequality, the good news is they self-correct. The bad news is the mechanisms for self-correction are war, revolution, or famine. Sure. Pestulence is a form of famine. We have that. I think we're in the midst of revolution. I can't get over. I've been fascinated by this GameStop phenomena. And I've been talking to a lot of young people, most of them pissed off at me on the comments I made around it. And I just can't get over the rage. And I'm like, your rage is justified, but you're being heavy-handed with the wrong people. There isn't a conspiracy in the markets. It's worse than that. There's a conspiracy across our entire country. The average billionaire, speaks to his or her senator every month.

That's crazy. Every month. Once a month, there are something like 17 billionaires in Maine or something, and on average, they speak to their two senators in Maine once a month. So what do you know? They're not bad people, but basically only 400 families were responsible for 50% of the political contributions in the presidential campaign, and then they speedball their influence with PACs, think tanks, a small number of families, very wealthy families, basically own the biggest media

properties. So slowly but surely, we've ended up with a series of policies that really help the rich, whether it's lower estate taxes, lower taxes on capital gains, everything. I mean, people say, well, the game is rigged. It's actually, it's not rigged, it's tilted. And the opportunities I had were much greater than the opportunities you have, and the opportunities you have are even greater still than the 22 or the 25-year-old trying to get their piece of the action. And I can literally hear these kids or young adults, you can hear them screaming out. And like, boss, I want my chance too. We've had the economy in the U.S. has rocketed forward in the last 30 years. Incredible prosperity. No progress. No progress. Corporate profits at all time highs, stocks at all time highs,

really strong or decent GDP growth. The billioners in the United States in the last 10 years have gone from $1.9 trillion to $4 trillion. Federal minimum wage in that same period has gone from $7.25 an hour to $7.25 an hour. This didn't happen by accident. We have weaponized our government, the shareholder class, and old people, older people control the government. And quite frankly, it's now getting to a point of self-preservation. When Jamie Diamond and Jeff Bezos talk about things like UBI, I, maybe they're being thoughtful and generous. I think it's self-preservation. At some point, at some point, the guillotines are coming out. I mean, this is getting, I knew there was rage out there. I didn't understand how much rage there is. And as I listened to these young men and women,

there's just no getting around it. It's justified. Well, yeah, we're having our cocaine and champagne party, right? And it's a lot of fun. And they're out shopping for pitchforks or sharpening their existing pitchforks. And rightfully so, you know, look, my connection now that I've never had a commute here, is looking in my feedback Friday, the advice shows the inbox. And there are people that are younger than me, you know, by quite a bit, they're in their 20s, they're way more talented than I was in my 20s. They're much more responsible at the very least. And they're trying to get jobs that don't necessarily even guarantee that they're not going to have to hit the food bank during the summer months. If you're a public school teacher right now, you're making enough money to maybe not have to go and

get free food. And I know this, I'm not exaggerating, right? I'm sure you know this. There are public school teachers that have to supplement their income by essentially going for donations from places like food banks and things like that in order to feed their kids and family, which is absolutely ridiculous. These are people with full-time jobs in college educations. They should not have to do that. Now, it's not everywhere, but it just doesn't make any sense for somebody, for someone like me to make 10 times or 15 times as much as a teacher, right? It just doesn't make any sense. And I think a lot of people in your shoes and my shoes, we think, well, this is great. It's kind of working out for me. But I never cared about being wealthy at all growing up. I didn't care.

But as I got older, it became really clear, and this sets a dangerous sort of precedent, that the best thing you can do in the United States to ensure that you aren't totally screwed is to actually become part of, let's say, the 1%. You shouldn't have to do that. Being a part of the top one to 10% or even the top 5% of income earners in this country shouldn't be like an insurance policy against dying young, not being able to afford health care, not being able to have any opportunities for my kids. That shouldn't be the bar. Does that make sense? Yeah, in this pandemic, and we don't like to say this out loud, but if you're in the top 10%, much less the top 1%, and you're blessed with good health, you're living your best life. The pandemic has meant

more time at home, more time with Netflix, and your stock market portfolio has exploded. If you make over $100,000 a year, no change in unemployment whatsoever, and 60% can work from home. If you make less than $40,000 a year, 40% have incurred some sort of job interruption and less than 10% can work from home. So there has been, this pandemic has just taken a bad situation and made it worse. And what's really upsetting about all of this is that I wonder what would have happened, Jordan. Say Amazon stock, which is up 70% on the year, was down 70%. I believe that if Amazon had crashed, as opposed to accelerated, when the Amazon band showed up in my driveway tomorrow with my espresso pods,

two people would have got out. The delivery person with my box, my espresso pods, and another person in a white coat who would have stuck a vaccination in my arm. The TAS-125, which is the NASDAQ in Israel, is down in 2020, and they are vaccinating people at seven times the rate. We have not had a full-throated capitalist response to the pandemic because the capitalists are doing just fine, specifically the shareholder class. And I'm not saying that wealthy people want people to get sick. I'm not saying they're not empathetic, but within seven days of World War II breaking out, seven days after Pearl Harbor, Chrysler converted its biggest factory in Michigan to a factory punching out M1 Bradley tanks. And that one factory produced more tanks than the entire Third Reich for the duration of the war. What company here has totally totally pivoted to fight? What would have happened if Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Tesla, all said, until we have hurt immunity, we're just full-time focused on this pandemic. And nobody, unless there's a profit incentive around this, it hasn't happened. And our government has had an incompetent response. What if Amazon stock had gone down 70% and what if this were killing thin white people? I just think we would have had, I think we would have made the response in Singapore or South Korea look amateurish. I think we would have gotten all over this thing. I worry that the people who at the end of the day are responsible or have just outsized influence, because they haven't had the same sort of incentive or incurred or registered, the real devastation as communities of color, low-income communities, that we just haven't seen. This virus really hasn't seen what America is capable of because it hasn't inspired the type of response that we're capable of.

I assume people must call you a socialist all the time now for saying things like that, right? Like, how many minutes has it been since you've gotten a message in your inbox about being socialist? I get called a lot of names. On Reddit, on Wall Street beats, I'm being called mostly a clown or a boomer, crying boomer is what I'm getting. Capitalism, I'm a full-throated capitalist. Capitalism has been great for me. Yeah, I know.

I'm just saying that's what you, people call people like that, people like you, a socialist when you say something like, hey, this might be unfair, right? Well, here's the thing. What we have now isn't socialism or capitalism. When you capture the gains on the way up and then you socialize the losses, and that is the CEOs of airlines, pay themselves $150 million over the last five years and talk about rugged individualism, when they're talking in the free market economy, when they pay themselves $10 to $30 million a year. And then when they get hit with a pandemic and their business is no longer sustainable because they've taken all their free cashful and bought back stock, which juices the stock price, which again juices their compensation as 98% of it comes from stock options at that level, then when they don't have a buffer, And the pandemic hits, all of a sudden, their narrative shifts to, we're in this together. We're in this together. And they want bailouts. So when you have capitalism on the way up and socialism

on the way down, that's not capitalism or socialism. It's cronyism. And we've gone full cronyism. Why are we bailing out Delta? Burn, baby, burn. And then a younger group of employees will come in, buy those planes, buy those gates rights for less, for less. And they'll have a shot at the American dream. Instead, it's like, oh, no, we got to keep these companies in business. We shouldn't be protecting businesses. We should be protecting people. $750 billion to small businesses. We romanticized small businesses.

I've been a small business person. I love small business. I've had small businesses go out of business. And it's tragic, but it's not profound. With $750 billion that we bailed out the wealthiest cohort in America, i.e., small business owners, you could have taken the bottom third of income earning households, say the bottom 35 million or 40 million, and you could have given them each $20,000. What happens when you give a small business person a bailout?

Some spend it. Most don't because the reality is most didn't need it. What happens when you give $20,000 to a low-income household? They spend it. And we need the economy. We need stimulus in the economy that's truly stimulating, not something that ends up back in the market in people's bank accounts. So anyways, I really think this pandemic has brought on,

has pulled back some really uncomfortable truth that we have to deal with. And the first is that we have fallen out of love with the unremarkables. and the second is everything is tilted one way. That is towards the old and the already rich. And that's not what America is about. America is about putting in place policies that can get people rich, not keep them rich. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Scott Galloway. We'll be right back.

Thanks so much for listening to the show, for supporting the show. It's your support that keeps us going. And I don't just mean your kind words on social media and email. Those are appreciated. but when you support our sponsors, that's what keeps the gears turning around here and lights on in my office. So please do consider supporting those who support us. And all of those codes, all of those discount, deals, whatever you want to call them, they're all on one page in one place, in alphabetical order at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support

this show. And don't forget, we've got worksheets for this episode here today if you want some of the drills, takeaways, exercises that we talked about here with Scott Galloway. Those are all also in one easy place. The link to the worksheets is always in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of our episode with Scott Galloway. It's interesting. You are saying the same thing in almost as many words as Mark Cuban and Charles Koch. So when all three of you agree on something, it's kind of remarkable because you wouldn't normally expect that. Yeah, exactly. Charles Koch on the show said something similar. Mark Cuban on this show said something very similar, that leads me to believe that it's very, very likely accurate because you have

people that normally, let's just say, don't always see eye to eye on every, and most things saying that same thing. Now, you said something at the top of the show, and I'm going to try to remember it because it was like 40 minutes ago or something along those lines. You said something that sounded like, look at a curve of where your current skills would be in 10 years and see if you're not there right now. Does that sound familiar? I'm probably butchering this. Does that ring a bell? I think a decent exercise for any company in any individual is look at the three biggest trends in your industry, look at the three biggest trends in your life, and take them out 10 years. If you're struggling with mental illness or you have signs of early mental illness, I think the pandemic has accelerated that trend 10 years. I think if you're in bad shape and you're not eating well or you're drinking a little bit more or you started drinking a little bit more, becoming a little bit more, you know, that one glass of wine is turned into two glasses of wine. I think if your relationship is unhealthy, take everything out 10 years and say, shit, am I here right now? And then in companies, okay, if it's a move from doors to digital or if it's a move to automation, whatever it might be, say yourself,

if that trend line went out 10 years, are we here right now? Because the accelerant component of this pandemic is remarkable, just remarkable what it's done in almost every trend in every industry, the slope, whether it's up or down, is just increased dramatically. So I think it's a really useful exercise to go through both personally and professionally. Is your relationship with your sister coming off the tracks, right? Is it just gotten worse? This only makes it really bad. So it's an opportunity and nothing is predetermined. You can step back. And I encourage people to take an audit of the relationships during the pandemic because I think it presents an incredible opportunity for repair and to say what relationships, what really important relationships in my life were headed in the wrong direction? Because I bet the pandemic really sent it on a downhill trajectory. And then to step back and say, do I need a step change, re-transformation around my behavior, their behavior, to reset the trajectory? in the slope of this relationship. I'm going back to my book, Algebra of Happiness. All the studies kind of point to the same thing. The happiest people, loosely speaking, roughly speaking,

it's all about the number of deep and meaningful relationships you have. And the opportunity in the pandemic, quite frankly, is when a crisis is for the cementing and repair of key relationships. A lot of people are struggling. A lot of people are struggling. Anyone with a lot of kids who are at home right now, they're struggling. A lot of people who are economically, who are always kind of dancing between the raindrops, but getting by, they are really struggling right now. Anyone with mental illness, older people who are sequestered from their kids and their grandkids, there's just so many people having a tough time. If you're in a position to get off your heels and onto your toes, if you're economically blessed, if you're blessed with good health care, quite frankly, if you just

have your shit together and you're able to work through this, it's such a great opportunity to think, okay, who in my life, you know, is there someone older in my life that I can pivot to a caretaker? Do I have the relationship with my siblings that I want? Is my relationship with my partner and my spouse? Is this an opportunity for me to reaffirm that and be more generous? It's just a tremendous opportunity because if you do show grace, if you do show love, if you do show empathy, you can accomplish in months what otherwise might take years because I think people are really, really, a cohort of people right now are really struggling.

Anyways, it got a little bit preachy there. No, it's all good. That's why we like having you on the show because I can sort of wind you up and then, you know, you go through it. Just let him go. Right, just let him go. And then I'm, wait, where's the off switch? Where's the off switch? I'll come back to another topic and then it's just like, great, more gold. I wonder why we shouldn't do free college. You know, I read, of course, your newest book, and we'll link to that in the show notes. It's excellent and it's mostly full of, I would say, not really necessarily predictions, more so as a recitation of what is so right now and where we may be going. But you said no free college. And I thought that's interesting because you and I were just talking about opportunity and how, how difficult it is to get into a good school. Why shouldn't we do? free university. It's actually, your argument essentially was that it's good for rich kids, even though it sounds like it's for poor kids. Yeah. So I don't believe in free college, nor do I

believe in a Marshall Plan or to pay off student debt. And for the following reasons, the majority, free college from the Bernie Sanders, Senator Warren or Senators Warren and Sanders call for free college, is again, and Democrats are just as guilty of this as Republicans, another transfer of money from the poor to the rich. Who's in college? The vast majority, or call it 50 to 70 percent of people in college are either upper middle income or wealthy. They don't need free college. And quite frankly, college shouldn't be free. There should be some costs because you're going to make more money and you can afford a certain level of student debt. What we need to do is two things. One, make sure that anyone who's qualified can't afford it. Sure, they have to take on student loans.

I had to work my ass off. At UCLA as cheap as it was, I would go into the summer months. And if I did make $3,000 to pay for my fraternity house bill and tuition, I wasn't coming back for my junior year at UCLA. And quite frankly, some of that fear and hustle and grit was good for me. But today, I just couldn't afford to go. We have to give people the opportunity to go, even if it means a little bit of debt. The bigger issue is we need to dramatically increase enrollment in acceptance rates. And we talk about the Ivy League. The Ivy League see themselves as luxury brands. They have lost the script. They're going to double down on exclusivity. They're sort of unimportant. Florida State will graduate more people this year than the entire Ivy League combined, as well, Ohio.

Ohio State. Where we move the needle in America is with our great public universities. You mentioned Michigan, the University of Texas system, University of California, a quarter of a million students, Cal State, 450,000 students. We need through a combination of federal funding and technology to double admissions rates while decreasing costs, but we don't have free college. And you can do that with technology, the embrace of small and big tech. If we took 50% of our courses online, And the dirty secret, and I teach, about half of the sessions could be online with no real erosion and quality. There are lectures where you're basically lecturing. There's no interaction. It's fairly dry material. You could communicate it with better technology and better production values remotely. If you took 50% of courses online into college, you effectively overnight double the supply and maybe an incremental increase of 10% in cost. So, and then the social stuff, the leadership, the interaction, the socialization. Kids do that. They scale that really well. They will figure out a way to find extracurricular activities, to meet each other, to drink beer, to go to football. They do that stuff that scale really well. The inhibiting factor has been, again, another transfer of wealth from poor to rich people. If I make it harder and harder and harder to get into UCLA, my certification, the tattoo on my forehead that says UCLA and Berkeley just makes me more qualified and me richer. Meanwhile, the people haven't gotten in in yet, specifically people who aren't rich or remarkable don't get in. So we need to,

one, no free college. That's ridiculous. It should cost something. And rich people should pay full freight and get no financial aid because, quite frankly, they can afford it. That's fine. We need to make it more affordable for kids who can't afford it. But even more importantly, we need to dramatically expand our capacity, our supply. UCLA shouldn't have 8,000 people entering its freshman class. They should have 18,000. Stanford hasn't increased its freshman seats by one goddamn seat despite the fact that triple the number of applicants. They get triple the number of applicants they did 30 years ago and their endowment has exploded. I mean, are you public servants? We're not luxury brands. We're public fucking servants. Let's start acting like it. Let's start

acting like it. Let's take kids who are just mostly remarkable and give them remarkable opportunities, the kind of opportunities that you and I had. The whole point of higher education isn't to turn the top 1% into billionaires. It's to take the unremarkable and turn them into the remarkable. So I think University is the higher ed, which used to be the upward lubricant of mobility in our society, has become to the agent of casting. It said, okay, okay, fine, you're remarkable. You get in. You get into the hunger games. You're Russell Crow. You get to be in the fighting pits. And if you're remarkable, it's the hunger games, you go on to live a great life. But the majority of you are going to die of violent death, unless you're born into royalty, unless your parents are rich.

I think that higher ed has become the agents of the caste system. I speak a lot about, this, I've gotten enormous amounts of shit and grief from my colleagues. Yeah, of course. But basically, tuition has exploded 1,400 percent in the U.S. The total number of kids were educating. The number of seats has not increased dramatically. The salaries they're getting relative to inflation has not increased dramatically. So wait, what's going on? If tuition has increased that much, what's also increased. Administrative costs, specifically compensation for college administrators, has also exploded. So every decision, or near every decision, that these very thoughtful, very woke people make every day on university campuses is with one objective. How do I reduce my accountability and increase

my compensation? Ninety-seven of the 100 highest-paid civil servants in Massachusetts work for the University of Massachusetts. And these people make between $600,000 and a million dollars a year. A principal at a public high school makes between $80,000 and $140,000 a year. Colleges have become pigs at the trough, especially administrators. The reckoning is over-distance. do, the fists of stone of COVID should come from them, but universities have totally lost the script. Higher ed in America has become totally obsessed with scarcity and luxury, and it's no longer, it needs to go back or return to its rightful place in our economy, and that is as being the upward lubricant that it was for you in Maine.

What about a national service program? You mentioned this in the book, and I've been a fan of this idea for 20 plus years since coming back from my exchange in Germany, where they have this, You can either go to the Army, I want to say for two or three years, or you can work, I think, generally in like hospitals or nursing homes or both. And everyone who goes through something like that comes out more mature. I think you get paid. So you're kind of, it's kind of like training wheels for living on your own, except you're working with a bunch of young people, so it's also fun.

But it's not necessarily university. And then you go to university or you realize that you're capable of doing a job that isn't, you know, like raking your parents' lawn. and you become a functional, in theory, you become a functional member of society after that. Well, when you think everyone agrees, the nation is divided. So then you quickly go to, well, what do we do about it? And I think you start with, well, what is a nation? We have to be able to rally around a set of values.

We have to rally around a truth. It feels like we no longer have a truth. I was brought up to think that once there was double-blind scientific research that said that vaccinations on the whole are safe and good for you, that we accepted that as a truth. and we began working from that truth. That's no longer the case. The other thing is that we have divided or disarticulated or splintered into so many special interest groups that don't seem to have a common connection. And one of the reasons I think we passed so much great legislation in the 50s and 60s is that a lot of our leaders had served in the same uniform.

And they saw themselves as Americans first before they saw themselves as Republicans and Democrats. You have a lot of young people at home without a ton of great prospects professionally. You have a huge demand for testing and tracing. So my thought was we should have a Corona Corps, and that is a half a million to a million young people paid $30,000 to $50,000 a year that were trained in handheld technology. They're not immune to bullets in this war, but they're much less susceptible to the damage from if they catch the virus. And they should be out, I thought, coaching, counseling, testing, and now vaccinating.

And then a two-year stint, and then they get money towards education, maybe a low-interest loan for a business they want to start, subsidize vocational training, if they don't see themselves as the type of person that wants to get a traditional four-year college degree, and more than putting young people to work, more than giving them skills, more than helping put a stake through the heart of this fucking virus. We need to have a shared experience among the next generation of leaders here. We need something where they look at each other and they say, I see you as an American. I don't see you as left. I don't see you as right. I see you as an American. I think national service does that. There's a lot of studies that show the nations that have

had national service, whether it's Israel or I think they have it in Norway, there's a greater sense of the collective that we're in this together. Yeah, we have our differences. Yeah, we might fight. The Army has been a fantastic place for integration, people from different races. I think that the peace, if you talk to people on the Peace Corps, they have an incredible bond. I think this is an idea that time has come. And I don't know if it's the armed services. I don't know, you know, there's some There's AmeriCorps, there's quite a few organizations that are doing something wonderful that's very similar, a facsimile of this. But I thought that the novel coronavirus presented an opportunity. And the way I mathed out, you were talking about $60 billion to take about 500,000 of these kids,

total cost of 120,000, two years plus subsidize some of their future training. 60 billion, my God, we're spending that every four and a half days on stimulus on these total bailout packages. So I think we need to unite as a nation. I think there's a bunch of things. We need to punish the companies that have these algorithms of amplification that are dividing us. We need a collective goal around national service. And I think we need to reunite again around something called a truth. We have to decide there is a truth. And then once that truth is there, that people who destroy that truth or question it or try and poison it, end up censured, expelled from the Senate, under legal liability, if they're a media company, But I worry that we're no longer a United States of America. I think I just can't get over when I go on Twitter, which is poisonous. I should probably get off it for a while. Just how differently people perceive what I would argue is I thought that was a truth. I thought that there was science showing 80% of day traders lose money. And we can't agree on that. You see it as a movement against a generation of people who are, you think are stealing from you? I'm like, no, there's a truth here. Day trading is bad for you. There's a truth here. There aren't space lasers from choosing the fires. You know, there's a truth here. The elections should be certified. So I think Corona Corps, I got off on a tangent as I always do, I think some sort of national service would be a key component or one of the legs of the stool of kind of reuniting or making our states of America more united. I agree. And I think it's kind of a

shame. It's a missed opportunity, right? Because we have kids that like me who go from high school and then go to college. And it's just too much too fast. We don't know what we're doing. We screw around for the first two or three years till someone says you have to pick a major or you're not going to graduate or whatever you know you're going to default to general studies. Yeah. And then you kind of go like, okay, German or whatever, or in my case, you make one. But what I really needed was two years of not having my hand held by my own parents and having to do something on my own and actually achieving something that wasn't just like reading a

textbook and regurgitating the information in an essay. I needed to do, I needed to get a job that wasn't going to fire me for being the useless lop that I was, but was going to do a little bit of professional handholding. Yeah, I got to UCLA. I was 17 years old. And I abused alcohol. I was very immature, got terrible grades. And it just wasn't a productive year for me. And the research is that when kids take a gap year, one or two years, 88 percent return to college. So that's the fear of parents. Oh, no, if they don't go right to college, they're going to end up on meth and on the streets. No, 88 percent of the kids who take a gap year go back to college. And then after their gap,

year, they're much more likely to graduate if they take a gap year. So in other words, kids who take gap years are more likely to end up with a diploma because they get some growth. I don't think it should be mandatory because it's easy from my generation to start conscripting other people, but I think we make it lucrative enough and attractive enough that an 18-year-old can contribute to society. I think there's a lot of ways to contribute. I think our society has no shortage of needs. But I'm a big fan of this idea of Corona Corps, and I even got some attention, or it got some attention, I should say, from some of the leadership in Washington. I don't know if it'll go anywhere. And there are some great AmeriCorps is doing it, obviously,

Peace Corps. There are some great organizations trying to do something very similar. Well, thank you very much. Crying Boomer Socialist, Scott Galloway, everybody. Clown, you forgot clown. Sorry, I'll add it. I'll put it in post. Thank you very much for your advice, your time. People can hear you on a, multitude of podcasts that you have. To resist is futile, Jordan. To resist is futile. And we'll link to those in the show notes as well.

I'm a fan. I'm so glad that you are able to come on and share. It really is great, and I like to call you a friend because I think you're one of the smartest guys around that's sharing your thinking right now, especially. I appreciate that. Thank you for that. Thanks, Jordan.

Best luck. Congrats on all your success. Thank you. I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, here's a preview of my conversation with one of Al Qaeda's most respected bomb and poison makers who swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden himself.

Here's a quick listen. We took so many prisoners. 80 of them were taken to a clearing, and it was decided there and then that these people will have to pay for the crimes what they did, seeing the bloodthirsty nature of people who, just until a year ago, I used to see them as sweet, tender, decent, good people,

suddenly basically became people who would use chainsaws to dismember these people alive. how could one year in Bosnia, one year of ugly conflict turn these wonderful souls into ugly, blood-thirsty individuals? When I went to sleep that night, all I could think about was, how could I unsee what I've seen? None other than the mastermind of Nun 11, Khalis Sheikh Mohammed, he said to us, you should go to Afghanistan, where the training camps are reopening to become good at Bombay. to become good at urban warfare, to become good at assassinations, at kidnapping, a new kind of war that will never be fought in the mountains anymore,

but it will be fought in every urban center from the pole to the pole. Suddenly, you know, I thought that the nature of the war is changing from, you know, fighting in the mountains of Bosnia. I mean, basically we are talking about gassing people in cinemas and nightclubs and trains. Of course, that was unsettling, but I thought this is just the ranting of one insane individual. Al-Qaeda carried a... out its first serious attack against American interests. Everyone was jubilant in the camps that were firing bullets into the air in celebration and shouting Allah Akbar. We are no longer just a bunch of

freedom fighters. We are now bona fide terrorists. To hear why and how Amund Dean eventually switched sides from being a jihadi to spending eight years as an MI6 spy trying to take al-Qaeda down from the inside, check out episode 383 on the Jordan Harbinger show. Thanks to Scott for coming back on the show. His book was really interesting, the latest book. It's called Post-Corona. He talks about what disruption is in an industry. We hear that term a lot, but in the book, he focuses on what's going to happen with advertising,

what's going to happen with college and education, healthcare. There's also some info on privacy and surveillance capitalism in the book. That's interesting. Our previous episode was Scott, incredibly popular. We will link to that in the show notes as well. So if you liked Scott on this. episode, definitely check out our previous episode, which focused on things like relationships, why you should invest early and invest often. That's true for money and relationships.

He talks about living a good, healthy, sane, happy life in many ways. The book he wrote for that episode is called The Algebra of Happiness, highly recommended, a really easy read, and some simple advice that really could and probably will change your life. That is, if you apply it. We'll link to that previous episode and the book in the show notes. And if you do buy books from our guests, please do use the website links that helps support the show. Worksheets for this episode in the show notes, transcripts for this episode, in the show notes, a video of this interview going up on the YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people

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