The Munk Debates Podcast - Spring 2021 Munk Dialogue with Scott Galloway: Episode 2

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

COVID-19 has fast-forwarded us into a confusing and uncertain future. Nowhere are the accelerating forces of the pandemic more evident than in our democracy. We are being challenged by rising authoritarian regimes, a reckoning on race, and intense debates on cancel culture, identity politics and free speech. The Spring 2021 Munk Dialogues host some of the world's brightest thinkers for in-depth, one hour conversions on the fate and future of democracy in a world remade by COVID-19. This episode features Scott Galloway in conversation with Munk Debates Chair, Rudyard Griffiths. Scott is a tech entrepreneur, social critic, and acclaimed author. He is Professor of Marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business, and a serial entrepreneur. His  bestselling books include The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, and most recently, Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity. For more information on the Munk Dialogues visit www.munkdebates.com/dialogues. The Munk Dialogues are a project of the Munk Debates and the Peter and Melanie Munk Foundation. They are sponsored by Gluskin Sheff, Onex, Bond Brand Loyalty and Torys, LLP. If you like what the Munk Dialogues are all about consider becoming a Supporting Member of the Munk Debates at www.munkdebates.com/membership. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates, podcasts and dialogues, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents).Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, I'm Monk podcast listeners. Rudyard Griffith here, your host and moderator. The following is a full-length edition of Scott Galloway's recent Monk Dialogue. Scott Galloway is a professor of marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business. He's a serial startup entrepreneur and tech investor. He's a podcast phenomenon in his own right with the Professor G. Show and an internationally bestselling author. The Monk Dialogues are an ongoing series of in-depth, hour-long conversations with some of the world's brightest minds and sharpest thinkers on the big issues and ideas transforming our world in this extraordinary moment. I hope you enjoy the program. Scott Galloway, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Thanks very much, Rod. Good to be with you. Very much looking forward to this conversation.

And, you know, Scott, I think one of the kind of truisms coming out of this pandemic has been the concept that the last 12 months, the virus has, quote, accelerated everything. So you subscribe to that, but you have a kind of interesting twist on the nature of that acceleration. You've characterized it as dispersal, a dispersion of everything. Unpack that idea for us. What are you getting at? Why is it more than just simply things getting faster? Why is dispersion, in your view, a key concept, a key idea to understanding the post-COVID world?

Sure. you and nice to be with you. So time is theoretical and the way we try and ground it is with this notion that these geophysical objects circle sphere of hot plasma and that is supposed to give us a reference for time. But the reality is or practically how we perceive time is through change. And if that is really how we absorb and emotionally respond or perceive time, then a lot of us have experienced a decade in the last 12 months. And that's true across business, across our economy, society, politics. Dispersion is what I would describe as the kind of the next big wave or an attempt to understand how the economy is shifting. And that is there's been

three big shifts in the last 50 years. The first is globalization, comparative advantage of nations. Then there is digitization, loosely speaking, the internet, the introduction of the internet processing power, network computing. And then I think we're on the precipice of the third big shift, and that is dispersion. And that is essentially taking the source of value or the product or the service, and then figuring out a way to get it to the end-user, client, customer, faster, more efficiently by either reshaping or just downright skipping the supply chain. So an example of this would be Wonder Woman 1984 coming straight to your living rooms instead of stopping for eight weeks, the movie theater. It's the dispersion of the value of the rents on your labor and you renting

your labor out gets dispersed right to the end company without an office. It's 99% of us have, of the people who have contracted and toured and developed antibodies for novel coronavirus will have never entered a doctor's office, much less a hospital. So we're effectively have technology and companies leapfrogging the traditional supply chain. And the idea of the net benefit, as you will, is there's more spoils and less friction such that the creator of the source of content of the product can capture more margin. And the consumer gets a better product at a lower price with less friction. I think this is the next, if you will, tectonic shift in our economy could best be described as dispersion. And I think it's going to reshift or recalibrate

trillions of dollars in stakeholder value. Fascinating stuff, Scott. And a great segue to the first topic I want to pick up with you on. It's something you've written a lot about in your latest book post-Corona, but more importantly, something you've been thinking and writing about for years as a professor at NYU. And that's the nature of kind of 21st century capitalism and how our capitalist system and order is really undergoing a series of pretty profound transitions.

You've just mentioned dispersion and dispersion and dispersal as key features. But more importantly, there's some important kind of ethical and moral issues that this evolution, this latest evolution of capitalism presents us. So here's the first quote of yours that struck me as a great kicking off point to get your thoughts on the state and future of capitalism now. You write, in the past decade, we've transitioned from an innovation economy to an exploitation economy. Give us your sense of what you mean by exploitation. It's exploitation of workers, of the environment, of products.

Where are we feeling the effects of exploitation most acutely? So, loosely speaking, in the U.S. and Canada, we were an agrarian economy, then we went to manufacturing, then we went to services. and I would argue the last 30 years, people, optimists would say it's been an innovation economy, that we leveraging this magical thing called processing power. We've had tremendous, not only made existing processes better, but done entirely different things. No one envisioned Google 30 years ago.

And this innovation has unlocked tremendous value. I would argue over the last decade, the majority of the shareholder value creation coming out of kind of silicon Valley has been more about taking existing technologies and software and using it to arbitrage or exploit mostly human capital. Software that doesn't get you to point A to point B any faster, but figures out a way to take advantage of an underclass of people who are desperate for flexible work. And the only asset they might have is a car. And so we're going to figure out software that clocks them out when they're not working. And as a result, oftentimes it ends up skirting minimum wage

loss. A company that has so many people on it because it was innovating is now trying to figure out ways to create algorithms of amplification that promote controversial content beyond its organic reach such that it enrages you because enrage equals engagement. And engagement equals more clicks, more Nissan ads, more shareholder value. And so a company figures out a way to create video, then ends up radicalizing a lot of young men. The same company, Facebook, ends up two-thirds of people who joined extremist groups, joined because it was suggested to them that they joined this group. So it's been good for shareholder value,

but I would argue that there's been somewhat of a delay in obfuscation and a woeful or willful ignorance of these externalities, and that whether it's exploiting our teens' depression, whether it's exploiting an underclass of people who don't have options in terms of work. It feels as if we've had, because of a lack of regulation from our elected leaders, because they have difficulty understanding these concepts, less than 8% of our elected officials have a background in technology or engineering. We've moved from true innovation to exploitation.

And, Scott, to link that analysis to your first kind of reflection for us on this idea that what we're seeing in the last year is a kind of a, a leap forward, a 10-year revolution that has effectively removed supply chains from the economy. It's taking products, Wonder Woman, whatever it may be, direct to the consumer from the producer. What does that do in an economy that, as you say, already has these exploitation features built into these platforms and technologies? Where are the jobs? where are the livelihoods, where is the future of a middle-class income and lifestyle that is the

foundation in many ways of the participatory democracies that we currently inhabit? Yeah, that's the correct question. If you think about it, if you go very meta and you zoom out, we are the apex species. Our species is one. No other species is driving us out of landmasses. No other species can control the weather or, I should say, impact the weather. And then I would argue that our species' superpowers cooperation and the construct that leverages that cooperation coupled with self-interest to create incredible prosperity as capitalism.

And capitalism traditionally only works is if you have full body contact violence at a corporate level, which creates competition and innovation, you like companies go out of business, you let them hire and fire as the economy dictates. But it then sits on a bed of empathy. And we use some of that prosperity to provide housing for the homeless, to take care of our mentally ill veterans, to ensure that seniors don't live and die on the streets. And it feels as if most recently over the last 30 years has been a trend where we personify companies and we become more empathetic and loving to companies and harsher and more Darwinistic on individuals. And this is the problem with an economy that likes to be capitalists on the way up. five CEOs of airlines talk about rugged individualism.

You share buybacks artificially inflate their stock, pay themselves $150 million over five years. And then they have no cash when a pandemic comes along and all of a sudden they decide we're socialists and we're in this together and want bailouts. And what's I think the biggest mistake we're making in this pandemic is we loosely speaking are more focused on protecting companies and protecting markets and we aren't protecting people. And so capitalism, I don't believe, survives unless it sits on a bed of empathy and we make forward-looking investments and redistribute income such that we continue to have a ballast of any capitalist society, and that ballast is the middle class. If you look at where middle classes have thrived, geopolitically, that's the nation that becomes the superpower. The U.S. had the most prosperous middle class in history from the underworld war two to 2000.

We were the world's superpower. You would argue that geopolitically, China has made more progress the last 20 years than any nation. And it's no accident. They've added hundreds of millions of people of the middle class while we have shed people. So the middle class is the ballast. This notion of socialism, excuse me, capitalism on the way up, socialism on the way down, which I would describe as cronyism. It's neither. It's the worst of both worlds. Directly attacks the middle class. And I believe here in the U.S., including our response to this pandemic, there's nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to transfer money from young, lower, middle class cohort to an older upper middle class and wealthy cohort. This has been the best of times for the wealthy and for an older age group,

unless you're vulnerable to COVID-19. But we have as a society decided that corporations are people and we should protect them and be more empathetic, that we live in a meritocracy, and if you don't make it, it's your fault and you aren't deserving of our love or our resources. And as a result, the middle class, which distinct of the morality, which has been kind of the ballast for the U.S. and Canada, is under huge attack. So it feels as if we have traded off, we have bought into this notion of Darwinism and kind of barter town. And we now live in somewhat of a hunger games economy where we've decided our collective goal as a nation is to take the top 1% and turn them into billionaires. Whereas when you and I were growing up, it felt like the

collective goal of our societies was to take the bottom 90s. and give them a shot at getting into the top 10%. Well, Scott, let's go there because in your latest book, you know, you write about your own childhood in California, a childhood of some privation, a single mother really struggling economically to make her way and provide for you. Yet that very capitalist system created for you unprecedented opportunities as an individual, as an investor now, and, you know, a serial company. So isn't capitalism working just fine?

I mean, you certainly thrived. Yeah, and until the age of 40, I used to brag that I was self-made. I lived in a household that never had income more than $40,000. My mother lived and died a secretary, single immigrant mother left school at the age of 13, just me and her. And what I've come to realize is that I'm American-made, and that America used to love unremarkable kids. I wasn't one of these freakishly remarkable kids from the inner city

the inner city who got 99th percentile in every test in straight A's. I got mediocre grades, but I didn't test well either. But big government in the form of the University of California, Los Angeles for undergraduate and Berkeley for graduate school, let me get an amazing education and certification for a grand total tuition of $7,000 through seven years of undergraduate and graduate school. And let me in. The admissions rates at UCLA when I applied were 60 percent, and I had to apply twice. The admissions rate this year will be 9%, it's literally six times as hard to get in, and tuition has skyrocketed 1,400% in the last 13 years. And I would argue that America has fallen out of love with the unremarkables. And so if America today had said we only want to, essentially,

the greatest upward lubricant in the history of society is U.S. higher education. And it's become out of reach for mostly all but two cohorts. And that is the children are rich people. You're 77 times more likely to get into an elite university if you come from a top one percent of a earning household. At a third of the top 100 universities and five of the ivies, there are more kids from the top 1 percent than there are from the bottom 60 percent. And then the second cohort that we allow in is what I call the freakishly remarkable. And I can prove to each of us mathematically that 99 percent of our children are not on the top 1 percent. You know, I worry that we have decided, again, our collective goal is to take the remarkable and turn them into billionaires. I think in the United States, and to a lesser extent, Canada, it's never been easier to be a billionaire, but it's never been harder to be a millionaire.

And we have decided that we want to find the best and brightest and give them exceptional opportunities as opposed to creating remarkable opportunities for people who maybe were just good growing up, not great. So, you know, I am here with you right now because of the generosity and vision of California taxpayers and the vision of government that said that we love the unremarkable. And I think there's a zeitgeist in our society that's very dangerous, that we want to identify the remarkable and give them remarkable spoils, whether it's lower tax rates as they get wealthier, whether it's a lack of regulation because there are innovators, whether it's a fetishization of them, where we kind of almost create this sort of Jesus-like idolatry across our innovators, as we no longer have kind of what I'll call spiritual guides.

As a nation gets wealthier, its reliance on a super being and church attendance goes down. So we fill that void with new heroes. And the heroes today are these tech innovators. But I would argue that unless the U.S. and Canada sort of fall back in love with the unremarkables, we're going to end up in this, what the book, Meritocracy Trap, where we say to the winners, you deserve it, and we say to everybody else that doesn't get theirs, that it's their fault, and we become less empathetic. And I think capitalism collapses on itself without this empathy.

People under the age of 40 have seen their share of wealth cut in half. We have seen one in five households in the U.S. with children are now food insecure. And at some point, when the bottom 50 percent of America realizes that there's two men, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk that have as much wealth as half of America, they decide that the fastest way to double their income is to take that income at a way. And they either do it through populism or through violence. So I think it's become, it's advanced or evolved from a moral issue to a self-preservation issue. We are moving, in my view, towards self-correction around income inequality. The good news is it always corrects. The bad news is the mechanisms of self-correction

are usually war, famine, or revolution. So I think we're literally at that point. Yeah, when we had your podcast partner, Kara Schwisher, on this program last spring, she said that, you know, the existential question for Silicon Valley is, do we want to be driving around and up-armored Teslas in the future? Is that, in a sense, our fate? And that's a good transition to a second quote of yours. I want to throw at you, which strikes me as getting to one of the kind of, you mentioned it, one of these key features of this cultural moment,

especially the last 12 months. Let's have that quote board up. Our idolatry of billionaire innovators binds the winners to the structural advantages and luck they have benefited from, and it fools us into thinking we are just a few lucky breaks away from joining them. And, you know, Scott, this really, as you've mentioned, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, it is remarkable the celebrity that we have invested. in these people. And in a sense, the power beyond their sheer economic might and scale, which is truly immense, staggering, they are now, I guess as you say, a kind of idols in an almost

religious way for many people. Why did we get here? How do we get here? And do you think this is a new kind of permanent feature of this 21st century tech-entthused capitalist order that we find ourselves it? Yeah, so again, as religion and church has become less of an anchor for our society, our brain, our competitive management species is our brain, it's big enough to ask very complicated questions, it's so big we have to be expelled from our mothers kind of prematurely. And our brain is so big it can ask very complex questions, but it's not big enough to answer most of them. And into that void has slipped super beings and church that's supposed to help us answer the unanswerable. And because we're no longer as relying on church or a super being, that void

has gotten bigger. And into that void slips the closest thing in our view to some sort of godlike mysticism. And that is technology. Very few of us understand how an iPhone works. Very few of us understand how you can pray to something. And a prayer, what is a prayer? What is a prayer, it's really just a query. Will my kid be all right? Anyone who has kids is prayed. And now it's symptoms and treatment of croup, question mark into the Google dialog box. No one understands, or very few people understand how Google works. But we trust that Google, when we pray to it and we send a query into the universe, there's this divine intervention that sees everything. And then based on this all-knowing observation and power spits back the answer to your prayer.

And that answer is more credible and has greater veracity than any advice. you get from a job coach, mentor, or boss. You trust Google more than you trust any entity in your life. Google knows your HIV status. It knows if you have diabetes. It knows if you're thinking about getting engaged. It knows if you're contemplating divorce. It knows your sexual fetishes. You have a relationship with Google that is more intimate than any relationship you've had with any God, any spouse, any friend. And we trust technology and admire it to the extent that it's gotten very dangerous because not only we let certain individuals aggregate a lot of the way, level of income and wealth that is bad for our economy or takes the economy out of balance.

But we let these companies run unfettered. And when automobile companies started pouring mercury into the river or started polluting our skies, we had emission standards. When pesticides became bad for the food supply and the water table, we invented or had overfunded an FDA. With technology, there's really been very little regulation. These companies have had more noxious admissions or more externalities, if you will, than any company or any sector in history before we kind of stepped in.

And the reason why is we didn't look at the CEOs of Exxon or Dow or General Motors as being godlike, whereas people generally feel that Steve Jobs and people like Jack Dorsey, these innovators, have a certain spiritual righteousness to them. And I just wonder if it's dangerous that the new Jesus Christ of our society is an individual who denied his own blood under penalty of perjury to avoid child support payments when he was worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Should that be our Jesus Christ? So the sector in these individuals

are kind of given the mother of all Hall Pass and are not held to the same standards around taxation. Amazon's done $20 billion in profits the last 10 years. Their tax rate has been 4.8%. What's your tax rate? There are a lot of people who've gone to jail for a lot less than some of the executives around in technology in terms of depressing our teens,

in terms of not putting in place the requisite investments to ensure our elections are not weaponized, to ensure our young men are radicalized. There is lying in front of Congress. So this has gotten dangerous. This idolatry has translated to a lack of scrutiny, and these companies in this sector has literally overrun Washington. They're now more full-time lobbyists working for Amazon living in Washington, D.C. than there are sitting U.S. senators, the PR and Coms Department of Facebook spinning their image. is bigger than the newsroom at the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Washington Post combined. So we've literally been overrun here because of our own fetishization and our own idolatry,

which they take advantage of to an incredible extent. They've been very deft at exploiting this weakness of ours. Fascinating stuff. Scott, one of the things that you've written about as a big kind of revolution that is ongoing this year and will have possibly profound impacts for decades to come, including on our democracy, is what's happened to higher education. And the extent to which we have now run an experiment

on tens of millions of university and college-age students around the world, taking them out of the classroom into virtual environments. And I want you to reflect on that in the context of this quote from you about higher education itself and some of the values embedded in it. You wrote, Ivy League undergraduate programs are not colleges, but hedge funds that educate the children of their investors. So are you optimistic that over the last year, the disruption that we've seen in higher education opens up pathways and futures

for that educational system that, take us away from it simply being a hedge fund, an educational hedge fund for its largest investors. Are we on the verge of a democratization of higher education? Give us your take on it. So it's situational. If you think about, if you want to understand how disruptible or ripe for disruption in industry is, it's pretty easy. You just look at price increases of its core product relative to inflation. And unless it's filled that void with innovation, it's ripe for disruption.

It's garnered unfair rents and it's sticking its chin out. Think about technology. Every year technology gets better and every year they lower the price. And that's just a different viewpoint or zeitgeist. And as a result, every year technology captures more and more of the global economy. In education, we've raised prices faster than any other sector except for health care. And if you walked into a university classroom in 2021, it wouldn't look a whole lot different than it did 30 years ago. That spells disruption.

The thing that's accelerated that disruption is that last year, my brand strategy course, was 160 kids because the largest classroom at Stern held 160 kids. Because we went all virtual this year, they said, we expand your enrollment to 280. I said, yes, 280 kids each paying $7,000, that's $1.96 million in revenue to NYU for me to do this 12 nights. That's $163,000 a night in payment that's largely incurred in debt. The only product I could find where you get a $2 million price point and 97 points of gross margin is a pharmaceutical called Zolgesma that cures what was previously an incurable muscular atrophy disease. So save your life or brand strategy with Scott Galloway. One of those is not sustainable.

Now, what I think is happening is that if you look at the ivies, I predicted last year that they would partner with big tech and take their enrollments from 1,400 students, which is the size of Harvard's freshman class. to 14,000. I was wrong. These individuals and faculty and leadership have decided they're no longer public servants. They're Hermes and Chanel, and they're doubling down on their exclusivity. More kids will graduate from Ohio State this year and or Florida State than the entire Ivy League combined. So they're sort of, again, educating the children of rich people and some freakishly remarkable kids from the inner city so that they kind of gloss over the fact that they're no longer public servants. the needle gets moved is with our public universities that educate two-thirds of kids and also with the unbundling of certification. And that is when Google announces an IT certificate, a quarter of a

million people take it. The average job is $68,000. Two-thirds of the people that take that certification course didn't have a college degree. And most as importantly, Tesla and Google both announced that they are now going to create a certain number of jobs based on skills as opposed to certification. In other words, the majority of corporate and Canadian companies, it's easier to sneak into the building without a security badge than an undergraduate degree. And two-thirds of our young people do not end up with a college degree. So until the corporate world, corporate Canada and corporate America falls out of love with certification from elite universities, we just aren't going to create the types of on-ramps we need for young people, whether it's

investing in vocational training, or providing, looking at people's skills and saying, this individual could be successful at our company, and we're going to pay them the same amount and give them some similar opportunities. So I do think that the unbundling of certification, remote learning that should decrease costs and increase admittance rates, if you take 50% of the courses at UCLA Rudyard Online, technically overnight, you double the supply, and you should be able to double the admissions rates. Now, unfortunately, I think a lot of administrators want to create artificial scarcity. I think the majority of leadership at universities in the U.S. every day ask themselves one and one only question, and that is how do we increase

our compensation while decreasing our accountability? And I think this scarcity play or this faux luxury play has worked brilliantly for them. We have kind of a cartel where we only accept 5 to 10 percent of the applicants to the elite universities. The other 90 to 95 go down to the second tier because in America, we're convinced you failed as a parent. You failed as a species if your kids don't end up in a four-year college. We've taken advantage of those hopes and dreams and have raised prices to an extraordinary rate. And a lot of Americans end up, households end up paying a Mercedes price for a Hyundai product. So I'm hoping that technology and remote learning and the unbundling of certification and the de-fetishization of the college degree by corporate America and corporate Canada

all lead to more opportunities for younger people who have seen, again, their wealth cut in half, and also that the fists of stone come from the mothers of all chin, and that is an incredible self-aggrandizing, arrogant cohort called University Leadership. Well put, Scott. Let's move on to two back-to-back quotes here that get at your kind of some of your key insights on the nature of social media and, more importantly, the power of these algorithms that are now integral parts of our lives. The first is we used to trade time for value. We now trade our privacy for value. And the second quote is, the algorithm is this, innovate, obfate, and exploit. Connect those two

ideas for us. This willingness to give away our, our, our privacy in some cases with really little if anything substantive in return other than the service that is being provided to us and how the algorithm both enables that and also creates again this exploitation dynamic that you see as so pernicious in our society today so I think consumers to be fair, make this trade willingly every day. And that is they say, all right, you know, I'm going to tell Google and Facebook and Uber where I am, whether it's a selfie, whether than me ordering a car. And I've knowingly made that trade.

If I buy an Android phone, Android pulls 1,200 data points from your phone every day. iOS pulls 200. So when you buy an Android phone, you're usually getting a phone for free or near free in exchange for providing them with so many data. so much data that for the most part, they can offer you products that are more relevant. The problem is when that relevance becomes, all right, we see, we have an individual here who seems to be in Washington, D.C., going to extremist group, message boards. We've tracked all of that. And so we're going to start promoting or encouraging them to buy military vests and bulletproof vests

and zip ties. And the question is, is that a business model? Do we want a business model that not only encourages division, but ends up being a handmaid to sedition? Should the wealthiest people be engaged in a business model that results in a capital police officer being bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher? And then when they're accused of playing a role and they say, well, we're just a platform. It's just like using the telephone. When the reality is they're much more than that. and they know what's going on and they could take a role in preventing it.

But they abdicate all responsibility, whether it's this kind of BS supervisory bodies, similar to the one that Facebook has constructed, such that they can abdicate responsibility, or it's deploying very charming people to talk about gender balance or personal loss such that you don't focus on the fact that teen depression seems to be correlated with use of social media. And these firms know that. And in 2021 and the mother of all tone deaf's moves, Facebook has decided that they're going to launch Instagram for kids. I'd like my kids to spend more time on social media, said no parent ever.

So I think these companies, you have to hand it to them. They're remarkably innovative. These are incredible products. But they then move to an environment where they say, okay, if we're going to radicalize people, there's money in it. If we're going to promote anti-vax content such that only 14% of black Americans trust the vaccine, anti-vax content should have a discussion. It deserves to be heard. But what Facebook's algorithms decide is we're going to make it be heard everywhere because it causes controversy and rage, more comments, more advertising.

And so we end up with some very damaging externalities here, and that is things such as white supremacy, hate-filled content, anti-vax content, get a lot more oxygen than they deserve. Now, why is that bad? When you continually see something over and over and your mom sends it to you or it's in your best friend's feed, it begins to gain legitimacy. And those conversations in that dialogue begin to add some veracity to both sides. There's a dangerous both-sidism that takes place through this conflict. whereas pre-social media, a lot of these, what we thought were no-nones, that vaccines worked, that our democracy and our elections were safe and that they weren't being, in fact, weaponized.

So there is a danger here, or what I would describe as an existential threat, that these companies have inextricably linked their business model and their wealth and their power and how much people idolize them based on their ability to ignore some of the exploits, of young people or our worst, you know, this really taps into our narcissism. Just more specifically or more innocently, I've become more of a narcissist. When I get off this show or I get off a, I'll be on MSNBC tonight, I'll go on to Twitter to see how many people like me. Now, is that where we want to take our world?

Is that where we want to be? And then somebody will weigh in and say something negative about me. That'll get me angry. I'll weigh in and we'll get into about. and forth, and Twitter loves that because it's more engagement and more ads. So they're purposely going to ignore the fact that there are some people on the platform, actually tens of millions of bots, that are there with the sole purpose to start arguments, that want to tear at our society, that find it cheaper to attack our society with social media than playing by the traditional rules

with the military, what have you. There's a lot of bad actors in social media that are taking our tribal rage and pouring fuel on it. And I would argue the majority of the majority of the majority of of innovation now coming out of these companies is to try and delay and obfuscate what is actually happening. Their greatest increase in investment has been around lobbying. It hasn't been around an increase in AI or technology. It's around trying to delay the same regulation and scrutiny that other industries have been subject to. So I think we're now in a situation where the most talented people in the world, at least the ones that have the greatest grasp with the use of technology, are deploying those resources, that massive wealth, that intelligence, to try and ensure that these very

damaging business models are not regulated and continue to run unfettered. I think we're in very, I think we're in uncharted territory here. And I think slowly but surely we've become used to it and don't realize just how much these platforms and these technologies are changing us and rewiring our view of each other and ourselves and our nation. And it is not healthy. Scott, we're going to go to audience questions, and there were a lot of those. But before I do, I want to just get your thoughts on solutions, because a lot of what we're trying to do with these conversations is kind of push our minds forward to so, you know, what can we do about the issues that we've just discussed?

And to do this, let me read my final quote that I've selected from your recent book post-Corona. We'll get that up right now. It is, looking ahead, there are two priorities that should inform. our policies, restraining private power, especially by big tech, and empowering individuals. So, Scott, I mean, those are universal sentiments. 90% of people probably would subscribe to that. I think it's the how. How do you do that when the power differentials are so great, when individuals, as you've just described, I think rightly, are in some ways either willfully unaware of the threat or choose to look the other way?

Yeah, I do think the immunities are kicking in. And I think the silver lining is really big here. And that is whether it's so I think antitrust, breaking these companies up, there's few things the government gets right all the time. Every time we've broken up companies that's ended up oxygenating the economy, creating more jobs, unleashing innovation, reducing these externalities. And when you have people such as Tim Wu and Lena Khan going to the administration, we're going to see antitrust.

And I've been saying that for five years, but now I generally believe that's going to happen. I think there's a renewed focus on how much, how desperate the problem for young people is and that we need to invest more in vocational training. I do think that education is under attack in a good way and that we're going to see costs coming down. I think health care costs, health care is under attack by innovation. And I think that Americans have swung, quite frankly, to the left and said we need to invest in infrastructure. we need to rebalance, redistribute income. So I do think the immunities are kicking in. In the U.K., the government has decided that Uber's employees are, in fact, employees and should be subject to minimum wage laws. There are lawsuits and antitrust action against Google and Facebook across the U.S.

We're seeing Australia. There's a war between Zuckerberg and Murdoch and that war. I hope the bullets win. But it does feel like the immunities are kicking in. I'm actually quite hopeful. And across health care, across education, I think we're seeing the opportunity for huge progress. I don't buy into this notion where we throw up arms and say, the world is what it is. The world is what we make of it.

And whether it's funding Antitra, the FTC, funding the DOJ, putting in place, you know, Biden's talking about giving the IRS and the U.S. $70 billion with the sole purpose of going after the tax, is at the wealthy home. The IRS gets $12 back for every one you invest in it. We might rethink the CDC. Does it make sense we're spending $700 billion on our military and $7 billion on the CDC? An enemy that one-four-hundredth the width of a human hair killed 600,000 Americans. I don't see any tanks lined up at the Canadian-American border. So it's an opportunity to rethink how we allocate

capital. It's an opportunity to rethink how we, if we're comfortable with this level of income inequality, it's an opportunity to rethink whether we're comfortable with one in five households with children being food insecure. The Biden bailout plan will take the lower quintile of households and increase their household income by 20%. So I do think that we are, I do think that immunities are kicking in. I think there's a lot of reason for hope, antitrust, regulation, redistribution of income, and just Americans and Canadian. and saying, this is not the world we want to live in. And if we can make the world this way, we can undo it.

So I am actually, I'm a glass half-empty guy typically, but my glass is less empty today than it usually is. Thanks, Scott. Before we go to audience questions, I just want to remind viewers that if you'd like to, we'd be honored for you to consider becoming a donor to the Monk Debates. You can do that through our membership program at monkdebates.com forward slash membership. You get a charitable tax receipt, but also some great benefits.

Access to all of our dialogues, debates, streaming HD video. You get our monthly newsletter. And right now we're going to offer 20% off for a limited time. Monk membership. Use the promo code, Monk 2021. Thank you. Scott, let's go to audience questions. There were a lot that came in for you.

I've chosen what I think are some of the best, some of the most interesting. And the first up is from Mike. Mike is asking, what post-pendemic scars will have lifelong effects on children versus millennials versus Generation X versus boomers? So do you subscribe to that, Scott, that there might be different challenges for different age groups

coming out of this that could be long-lasting? It's an interesting question. So, well, I'll start. The most obvious one and the dirty secret of this pandemic is that if you're in the top 10%, much less the top 1% of income earning households, you're living your best life. COVID-19 has met more time with family.

There's been no change in employment for people who make over $100,000 a year. The top 1% has seen their wealth exploded to a greater extent in the last 12 months than in history. No cohort has gathered more income or increased their income in wealth more than the top 1% in America over the last 12 months. One man has added the GDP of Hungary to their net worth since the outbreak of the pandemic. So if you're wealthy, this has been the best of times. More time with Netflix, more time with family, and your wealth has exploded. If you're obese, you're incredibly vulnerable. And just as we have

politicized masking on the far, on the far right has politicized masking. On the far left, we have politicized obesity and we don't want to have an open and honest conversation around what was other than age, the number one signal or indicator of mortality because we see it as too politically correct to have an open, honest conversation around how dangerous it is to be obese. The cohort that I would say has paid the biggest price, the two cohorts, are single working. mom's. Remote learning has basically mean you have dispersed responsibility for teaching children to the mom. I think the mothers who are middle or lower income households are literally have been overwhelmed by this. They might be sure. They might not have a job they can do remotely. They have children that are now

at home all day. And then the lost generation, I think, will be low and middle income kids who in public schools on math and STEM typically keep up with their upper income cohorts, those lines have totally diverged because many of them live in insecure households without broadband where mom's not home to sit by their side and help them teach. And let's be honest, it's always the mom. And you have a lost generation of young people who are falling behind in math and English and may never catch up. And that beyond the moral implications there, we're going to lose an entire generation of military leaders, civic leaders, doctor, scientists, we're just less likely to find vaccines as quickly when the talent pool of human capital,

you know, millions of kids just fall behind and never catch up. We've seen young people who get most of their income from current income and from kind of frontline jobs. I think that the existing trend there has just gotten worse. Now in the U.S., more than half of people under the age of 30 live with their parents. That is bad. And for the first time, for the first time, you have people at the age of 30 not doing as well as their parents were at the age of 30. And then when they're living at home, they have this constant reminder that they're not doing

as well, which creates tremendous shame and rage. The cohort that I don't want to say I'm most worried about, but I think doesn't get a lot of attention because people don't feel sorry for, it's just not in vogue to look at males as an oppressed cohort. If you look at the number of men under the age of 30 that had never had sex, and people always focus on the word sex, but think of a sex as just a means of establishing a relationship. The number of men who had not taken that step to establishing a relationship under the age of 30 in 2009 was 8%, 1 in 12 men, it's now 28%. And so when you have young men in America, attaching to work, not attaching to school, and not attaching to relationships, you end up with the

most dangerous person in the planet, and that is a lonely, bored, and broke male. And why are they more dangerous than a lonely bored and broke female? They tend, young women don't tend to pick up AR-15s or start wars. If you look at nations across the world, the most unstable, violent nations in the world, have a disproportionate amount of young men who aren't, quote-unquote, attaching. So, I think this pandemic, which has hurt low wage and middle wage and also of economic policies that aren't as generous with younger people, people under the age of 35 are the only cohort that haven't seen the ratio of their wealth grow to their income. I think we're creating a generation of what I'll call volatility. I refer to it as the Virgin Homicides. If you look at the explosion

of mass shootings in the U.S., a lot of it is proximity and access to assault weapons. But it's also that we're just creating too many of these young people who have absolutely, especially young men, have absolutely no prospects. And they tend to become very depressed and sometimes violent. So a lot of cohorts have actually done, certain cohorts have actually done better. And we don't like to admit it in the pandemic. College educated, technologists, people in the right field, the wealthy have absolutely killed it. But the people, you know, if you were doing well before, you're doing great. If you were not doing well before, now you're really doing terribly. Again, it's not only an accelerant. It's something the pandemic has just taken the slope of every

trend and increase the slope. And the learning, I think, is, or an exercise is your company. Take the three biggest trends in your company. Look at the slope the last 10 years. Take it out 10 years and ask yourself, are you there now? And if so, how would your strategy change? I also think it's a Utah thing to do personally. What are the three most important trends in your life, your fitness, your mental health, your relationships with key people, look at the trajectory of those relationships and those features. Take them out 10 years and say, do you like where you are? Because that's where you may be now. This has been an accelerant. So I think it's situational. I think there are cohorts that have actually come out of this better and stronger.

But I would argue the two cohorts that have really had the toughest time are children from low and middle-income households that have fallen well behind and their mothers, and then young men who have very few prospects for being productive citizens in this economy. And I'm reminded that every day, quite frankly, because they're living at home. Fascinating question. Thank you, Mike, and fascinating answer. So thank you, Scott. Let's go to a question. from here from Leo who's asking, given how tedious and mentally exhausting full-time online learning is, have you revisited your views on the inevitability of universities going online? Why hasn't the pandemic demonstrated just how much we value in-person learning and contact? And I know, Scott, that this is more than just intellectual exercise for you. Right now, you are an investment.

in businesses that are looking to disrupt the traditional classroom kind of model. So what have we learned over the last year? And I think a lot of people would agree with Leo that it just, you know, I don't know, since the monastic era of the first millennium, human beings learn together. We learned as social kind of animals in groups. And there's something that is just unsatisfying on a, a deeply emotional, intellectual, mental level vis-a-vis digital learning versus in-person. Yeah, Leo's right.

Even right here right now, if Reddard, if you and I were on stage together, and then we had a chance to meet people, and I could sign books, and I could read the room, and there's just an electricity, and every good and bad part of the session would be more imprinted, and you'd walk away with feeling, it's just a more rewarding experience. We have a tendency to want to process information in the most efficient way, which is binary. So the discussion around return to office or office work, people say, well, companies are either going to go back to the way it was or are they going to go all remote. And the reality is 97 percent of companies are going to have a hybrid model where they go back to the office, but they're much more lenient or forgiving of people who decide to spend two days a week at home because they have to commute an hour or they're taking care of an elderly parent or a sick child. so the net destruction in gross demand for office space is going to be dramatic.

The same is true of school. I don't think remote learning is nearly as satisfying. But again, the dirty secret of faculty is that probably half of our classwork could be put online. I'm not saying videos, but we could do it online where it's mostly a lecture. And slowly but surely we've gotten much better at it. And there might be some erosion. But for example, I'm teaching. in the fall next year. I'm going to do have my classes online, the lectures where there's not a lot

interaction, and then the case studies where we really benefit from the back and forth, I'm going to do in person. And I think we're living in a hybrid world. You know, very few consumers live in isolation of anyone medium. The best retailers have a catalog, a store, and a website. The best learning will be in person and online to make it more efficient. So we're going to do, Leo, you're absolutely right, but we will take some of that learning and do synchronous remote, which should reduce costs and offer more access. If I only force you to come to NYU every other week, and I can dramatically expand the size of my class, that should increase access, reduce costs at a small, a small erosion and quality, and there are some things you can do with great remote learning that you

can't do otherwise. I can get much better speakers because they can pipe big. in. We can have really robust graphics. So I think that we will get there. Leo, you're right, but it's not an either or. It's an end. Got it. Conscious of our time, so I'm going to squeeze in one more question here. It's someone asking about Yuval Harari, who was in fact on a monk dialogue recently, Elaine saying Yuval Harari writes in his book, Homo Deyes, that human nature will be transformed in the 20th century by machines that uncouple intelligence from consciousness. Do you agree? And I think that's an interesting kind of note for us to end on, Scott,

because a lot of what we've talked about in this conversation is a transition where some of the qualities that most essentially inform our kind of humanness have been disrupted in this last year by technology. And I think some of us feel this kind of yearning. I know certainly I do to return to the public square, to return to a world of consciousness, not just of intelligence and information and data and zeros and ones, but something that is human, that is rich, that is real, that is all of us together finally again. So where do you see the longer trend, though?

Because people like Yuval Harari and others, I think, have this somewhat dystopian future in mind of the splitting off of intelligence and consciousness, a potentially dangerous and I think possibly spiritually kind of punishing future. Yeah, I mean, it's hard not to always defer to Yuval Harari. One of my favorite book Sapiens, this guy is a genius. I'm not personally as threatened by AI. I think algorithms are benign. They don't have so far any sort of sentient ability. and I think it's been used as somewhat of as an excuse for how culpable the people are who design these algorithms that end up amplifying dangerous content. And it's not the machine's fault. It's the individual who designed it. And I am very hopeful. I hope that, look, these algorithms and these corporations, if you want a rebellion, if you want a movement, what I tell young people, is that social media wants you to be divided and wants you to dislike people.

The fast food industrial complex wants you to be obese. There are people who want you to believe that government is not noble. So my advice to young people is to rebel. Bring empathy and love to others. Refuse to be fit, be strong. Refuse to believe that America and Canada and democracies aren't wonderful things and the most noble entities in the history of mankind that turned back Hitler, found a cure for polio, and invented the internet and played a role in these vaccines.

If you want a righteous movement, bring more civility to these dialogues, overrun, fight, and win against these algorithms, and demonstrate empathy. This is our superpower as a species, is cooperation. Every scientific study on happiness and living a rewarding life shows one thing, a reverse engineer is to one thing. And that is your happiness is a function of the number of deep and meaningful relationships you have. And the key to healthy relationships is the confidence to express affection and emotion, to demonstrate empathy, and to demonstrate forgiveness. So if you want a rebellion, if you want a movement, rebel and refuse not to be loving, refuse not to be empathetic, refuse to not be patriotic. Thank you, Scott. Great words for us to end on. But before we do, as we do with all of our dialogues,

we ask our participants for some book recommendations, for books that have affected you, Scott, that you think are kind of revealing to this moment that we're in and help us kind of think through the challenges ahead. So you've had two suggestions for us. What were they? Oh, I love the meritocracy trap. I'm worried about the notion that if we buy too much into meritocracy and that anyone can be a winner and that your efforts are directly responsible for success, the dark side of that is we believe that people aren't successful, that it's their fault and it attacks our empathy.

And then the curse of bigness by Tim Wu, just talking about how important it is that we have a healthy economy, a robust economy, and that we break up big companies as we have in the past, and we've returned to that proud legacy. Excellent, Scott. I'm going to check out both of those books. And just thank you so much for your time today. Indeed, you know, I sense from this conversation,

I would have loved to have done this on a stage with you in front of our monk membership and our monk audience. But this wasn't second best. I really felt like we've connected, we've had a conversation, we've talked about some important issues. And you've left me with, because I'm, I, too, one of those guys where the Cups often half full, but I think my cup's a little more than half full

as a result of spending this hour with you. So thank you so much, Scott. Thank you, Rod Yard. And thank you, Monk Dialogues. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that wraps up our monk dialogue with Scott Galloway. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Coming up in two weeks, we have our next program with Douglas Murray, a big thinker on identity politics, the issues and controversies

in our democracies that are pulling us apart. What can we do about it? We're going to have that for you on May 20th at 8 p.m. Eastern, Douglas Murray, joining us from the United Kingdom. And, of course, just another reminder that if you like the Monk Dialogues, if you like what we do at this organization,

please consider becoming a donor through our supporting membership program. You get great streaming audio of all of our events, high-quality HD video, access to transcripts, our monthly newsletter, and 20% off right now on our website using the promo code of Monk 2021. A big thank you to the Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundation for making these Monk dialogues possible. Thank you to the Monks. Thank you also to our presenting sponsors, Gluscan Chef and Onyx and our supporting sponsors,

Bond Brand Loyalty and Tori's LLP. Our social media partner is Facebook. We appreciate them distributing these talks through their platform and production by Amber Mac Media and Creative Harbor. Thank you both guys for your assistance. So that wraps up. Tonight's Monk Dialogue. We'll do this all again in two weeks time with Douglas Murray.

Be well, be safe, and check out Scott's book recommendations. Good night. We'll talk to you soon.