The Resilient Mind - The #1 Money Mindset You Need to Build Wealth in 2026 - Scott Galloway

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Scott Galloway is a Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern and a globally recognized expert on brand strategy, technology, and the future of the economy. He is a serial entrepreneur who has founded multiple companies, including L2 Inc., RedEnvelope, and Prophet. Galloway is also a bestselling author of books such as The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, Post Corona, and The Algebra of Wealth. Beyond academia and business, he hosts the Prof G Pod and co-hosts Pivot, where he delivers sharp, data-driven, and often provocative insights on markets, tech, society, and personal growth.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This episode is brought to you in partnership with Steven Bartlett for more inspiring videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to the number one money mindset you need to build wealth in 2026 with Scott Galloway. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. You've written a book on wealth, money, finance. Why? And why does it matter? This is kind of a memo to my 25-year-old self. I've been rich three times, and the first few times I lost it. And I didn't grow up with a lot of money. It's been very important to me. I think America, and mostly in Europe, but especially America, America becomes more like itself every day. And that is it's a generous, loving place if you have money. It's a rapacious, violent place if you don't. I think economic security is really important. And I think there's a series of habits and character traits that can help you get to economic.

security. You know that study that you become the average of your five closest friends, same body mass index, same politics, same sports teams, same neighborhood. What they don't talk about is that amongst those five people, even if they're all making about the same amount of money, one will end up much more economically well off than the other four. And I'm trying to understand the behaviors of that one person who becomes economically secure by the time they're my age without making a lot more money than their colleagues. Do you think we're taught about money? Where do those people, that one in five?

Where did they learn about money? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I think, so the honest answer is I don't know. What I would say sociologically is that rich people talk about money, and it's considered taboo for employees and middle class and lower class and women to talk about money. Like, you're told not to talk about your salary at work. asymmetry of information will always benefit the person that has symmetry that knows the information.

The boss of a company knows what everyone's making, but he tells his or her employees not to discuss their salary because Lisa might find out that Bob is making 30% more for doing the same work. So there's a bit of a zeitgeist that tells people not to talk about money, that it's like talking about porn or that it's vulgar. And I think you need to start talking about money and maintain a certain level of financial literacy from a very early age. because Roger Federer talks about tennis. If you want to be good at anything, most people want to be good at money. And to be good at something, you need to understand it.

And to understand it, you need to talk about it. So I'm very transparent with how much money I make, what I do with it. But talk to your friends about mortgage rates. Talk to your friends about how much money they make, what they're doing with it, where they lost money. And people aren't transparent about it,

especially I think about men. We're supposed to be just like accidentally wealthy. And to ever talk about our financial problems is to admit that we're not ballers or they were not masculine. And so I encourage people from a young age to start talking about money and understand it and be transparent about it.

Where did you learn about money? Because I think about my own life, and I think there's key moments of quite frankly luck. Yeah. Well, I was exposed to information because I was invited into a room, physically, literally into a room. Or I was, through no decision of my own,

someone came into my life. Yeah. Or in my case, maybe one of the biggest blessings I ever had. is when I went off, dropped out of university, and pursued entrepreneurship, my brother decided to go be an investment banker for 11 years in London.

Yep. And then when I had my first exit, he messaged me one day and said, hey, I'll manage your money, and I'll quit my job and come work with you full-time. And that's my older brother. So, like, life gave me the greatest gift anyone could ever have been given.

That rings so true. So I think of three things as you said that. The first is, the smartest thing I ever did was being born a white heterosexual male in California in the 60s, because it gave me unfair advantage. It gave me access to free education, the University of California, and access, 76 percent admissions rate when I applied to UCLA. The admissions rate this year is 9 percent. I came a professional age in the 90s when the internet was coming online. So I sort of had these wins at my back. And also, just to be blunt,

everyone that was raised in capital, looked, smelled, and felt like me. They were all white heterosexual males. And I didn't even realize at the time what privilege, unfair advantage I had. So the first is just sheer luck. The second is environmental. I was raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died of secretary. And people who don't grow up with money, people who grow up with money just can't really truly empathize with what it's like to grow up without money. I felt as if there was this ghost following me and my mom around, constantly whispering in our ear, you're not worthy. Your mom fucked up, which means you aren't worthy. And so I very early decided that economic security was really important to me.

I want to be clear, you can't make a decision to be wealthy. A lot of it is luck. But I was going to be very committed. My goal in life from zero to 45 wasn't to be a good person. It wasn't to save the whales. It wasn't to have strong relationships. It was to get economic security. So I started connecting the dots around money pretty early.

And then along the lines of what you were talking about, my mom had a boyfriend. and people don't talk about this. You know how in certain dramas they reference a second family where a guy has an entirely other family despite the fact he's married? My mom and I were that second family. Her boyfriend for seven years was a wonderful man named Terry, really nice to me, spent every other weekend with us, super generous to me. He was also married with another family. So we were that second family. But he was a good man. And he was actually a good role model for me. and one weekend, I was asking what is a stock? And I was 13.

And he said, here's $200. He gave me two crisp $100 bills and said, walk down to one of those stock brokages, those fancy stock brokages in Westwood Village and buy some stock. And if you don't buy it by Monday afternoon or by the time I'm back next weekend, I'm taking my money back. So at 13, I marched down to Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fender Smith,

was in the lobby, it was ignored, I got intimidated, I walked across the street to Dean Whitter Reynolds and other brokerage. And this young guy named Cy Serro came walking out and said, Hi, I'm Cy Serro. And he gave me my first lesson in the markets. And I bought 14 shares of Columbia Pictures. At 13, he gave you a lesson in the markets.

Yeah, at 13. And every day, every weekday for the next three years from Emerson Jr. High pay phone booth, I'd put two dimes in and call Cy. And he would say, close encounters of the third kind is a hit, which means that Columbia Studios is going to make a lot of money so people are buying more stock. And then I'd go into his office. I didn't have a ton of friends. And so I would just swing by Dean Witter,

and he would always give me a lesson in the markets. Had those two men not shown such generosity to you with that time and with that $200 bill, have you ever played out in your mind where you might be? I think we all do that, like sliding doors that movie. You know, things are, it's like life is such a series of, you know, I promised myself I was going to approach this strange woman at the Raleigh Hotel in the middle the day who was sitting by the pool, who was sitting there with another woman and another guy. And without the benefit of alcohol, it's not easy to open, you know, a conversation with a

strange woman. And I walked out to get my car and I said, I promised myself I was going to speak to her. I was very drawn to her, beautiful woman. So I went back in and just rolled right up and I said, hi, I'm Scott. Where are you guys from? And this was at the Raleigh Hotel. Long story short, 18 months later, our first son's middle name is Raleigh, right? And what I tell people is that unless you're willing to take an uncomfortable risk, nothing wonderful is ever going to happen to you. I mean, a really uncomfortable risk. What you're doing here is an uncomfortable risk. It's public failure if it doesn't work. This podcast platform you're starting. Most people aren't willing to take these risks. And a lot of this, not to get existential, a lot of this comes down to a huge unlock

for me has been atheism. I think I have a very solid grasp of the finite nature of life. You're a young man. You're going to be my age in an instant. And the thing you're going to recognize is it, okay, in 30 or 40 years, everyone whose opinion you are worried about is going to be dead. And I have found that has been an enormous unlock for me, knowing that I'm going to at some point sooner than I'd like, look into my kid's eyes and know our relationship is coming to an end. So I'm comfortable expressing my emotions are more comfortable. I'm comfortable taking uncomfortable risks, knowing that if I call someone and ask them to invest, if I approach a strange woman in a bar and introduce myself, if I call an employee who I would never think

would consider working for me. I'm not afraid of rejection because I realize everyone I'm worried about being shamed by is going to be dead soon and so am I. And so why wouldn't you live out life? Why wouldn't you live out loud? Why wouldn't you squeeze so much juice from this, you know, lemon called life? It's really been an enormous unlock for me because the reality, Steve, is that most people are not willing to take uncomfortable risks that might result in public shaming. It's embarrassing to get rejected by a potential to express interest in someone and be sort of rejected. It's embarrassing to try and raise money and be rejected. It's embarrassing to start a business and not have it work.

The majority of people aren't willing to take those uncomfortable risks. And the reason why you get outsized return as an entrepreneur, the reason why you get outsized returns when you're willing to approach strangers and ask for mentorship, friendship, express romantic interest is because you are willing to endure. rejection. The most overcompensated people in any organization are the salespeople. In terms of how hard and how smart they are, how hard they're working, how smart they are relative to their compensation, hands down the most overcompensated people that everyone resents are the salespeople. Because they are willing to get out a big spoon in each shit. Do not call me again. Okay, so what you're saying is I should follow up in a couple weeks, right? That type of rejection, that type of risk, that type of public failure,

99% of people are not willing to endure. I ran for sophomore, junior, and senior class president in high school. I lost all three times. And based on my track record, I decided I should run for student body president, where I went on to wait for it, lose. And it never really got in the way of my confidence. And that's the key. If you want, and unfortunately, young men are told, you know,

don't try hard or they feel like a loss of agency or especially romantically they're told be be careful in terms of expressing romantic interest and if you don't know the difference between expressing interest and asking someone out for coffee and harassing them you've got bigger problems but i think a lot of young men i feel like their agency's been taken away they feel like the game is rigged so they're not trying and quite frankly they're spending much too too much time on a screen or in their home so they're not putting themselves in a position to have something wonderful happen to them. And on a very basic level, I'm almost entirely sure that I can guarantee you that nothing really wonderful, I mean really wonderful, is going to happen to you inside of your home on a

screen. Your success is a function of your ability to endure rejection and increasingly how much time you spend outside of your house off a screen. What if you're not young? Because what you described there, that all of that was me at 18. I had just dropped out of you. You know, after going to only one of the lectures. And I had these four credit cards, which had about, I think, combined about a thousand pounds on them. I'd max them all out. My parents went speaking to me. I'm three hours away from home, roughly, up in Manchester, more than that, six-hour round trip in Manchester. And I'm 18. I've got no kids, no mortgage, no nothing. And I'm in this room that I can afford to pay for. So I was so clearly at the bottom with nothing to lose that every roll of the dice

was a potential win. So I was rolling that, motherfucker. But you kept rolling them. Over and over and over and over again. But I wonder sometimes, because there's probably going to be someone listening. That's 47, three kids, mortgage, comfortable job, just about cutting it every month, one holiday a year,

experiencing the same dissatisfaction with their life, but they can't roll like I could when I was 18. Look, the reality is when you have kids, everything changes. I think that probably the darkest moment for me, maybe personally or professionally other than losing my mom, was the moment that was supposed to be the happiest. And that was when my first son was born. And you think that when this child, when you, you know, this child's introduced to the world, it's going to be bright lights and angels singing. For me, if I felt humiliation and shame and fear, because I had made a lot of money,

but I had gone all in, and this is a lesson from the book, The Power of Diversification, I'd gone all in on this one company, red envelope, which went public in 2002 as an e-commerce company I started. And I thought and had been taught by the venture capital community that if you throw yourself at something and you're talented, and I thought, I'm a baller, I'm really good at what I do. You got to go all in and I kept investing every spare dollar I had and threw myself at this thing. And then a strike at the port, a software glitch and the credit crisis in 2008, our stock went from seven bucks to chapter 11 in like three weeks. And I ended up not being worth 10 or 12 million, but being worth negative two million because I was one of those it's borrowed against their stock to buy more stock. And then my child has the poor judgment, my oldest, to come marching out of my girlfriend, and the first thing I felt was failure on a massive level. Like my first emotion when my son was born was I have failed to live up to my core responsibility as a man, and that is to take care of my child.

And it was just a really ugly emotion. And that's a lesson in the book, and that is the moment you aggregate anything resembling some sort of decent amount of capital, you want to look at it and you want to diversify like crazy. Because if I had just taken a little bit of money off the table and invested in index funds or in real estate or bonds, I would have been so much better off. But everyone's told you can have it all. You can, you know, you can be successful if you just go all in, never give up. Well, actually, the market will trump individual performance every time. And last, week, the investment I was most excited about this healthcare tech startup, great CEO, tier one

investors, elbowed my way into the deal. I put $5 million in. I found out last Friday, it's a zero. It just didn't work. Zero shutting down. But here's the thing. I never invest more than 3% of my net worth now in any one thing. So while it hurts, I have Kevlar in the form of diversification. So I took a bullet to the chest, knock me up my feet. I get out. I was bummed out for an hour. That was it. Because I never go all in on something. And people are taught, especially young people, especially men who are more risk aggressive, go all in on something because the people who are the wealthiest people in the world kind of went all in on something. And what they don't tell you is the moment they have capital, they start diversifying like crazy.

So you want to diversify. You don't need to find the needle in the haystack. You can buy the whole haystack. And especially, unfortunately, in the American economy, not as much in the UK economy. it continues to be up and to the right. And the S&P and the NASDAQ are sort of self-filtering mechanisms because they kick out companies that aren't great and they bring in nuance. They kick out Kodak and they bring in Salesforce. If I had learned that diversification when I was a younger man, I would have saved myself a lot of economic harm, I would have saved myself a lot of mental anguish. So diversification, and that's one of the key components of my algebra of wealth, diversification, people don't recognize how powerful it is because it sounds boring. And you have people

like Bill Ackman saying, it's not concentration, it's conviction. And then they beat on their chest, like check out my shit. No, diversify and get rich slowly. Because here's the thing, life goes so goddamn fast. While life has gone slowly, said no one ever. Now back to your person who's 40, 45, they're going to live another 40 years. They're probably going to work another 30. You want to lean into your advantages. Your advantages in your 20s are flexibility. You want to workshop careers, find your talent, not your passion. Start saving a little bit of money. A little bit of money when you're young is a lot when you're older trying to develop that savings muscle. A hundred bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month. Oh my God, $2,500 a month. If you can do that in your 20s, you're going to be fine when you're my age.

even if you don't go double platinum or sell a book or be a baller in business, you're fine. Your plan B is all set. That's your advantage when you're in your 20s is time. When you get to your 40s, your advantage is the following. One, hopefully you're in a relationship with a partner. You can align with around financial objectives, your approach to spending, your approach to earning. You can see the runway. All right, I'm going to retire in 30 years.

I need 15 to 25 times my nut to be in the bank to retire. I spend about $120,000 a year that 20 times that I would need $2.4 million. Now, work backwards. How much would I need to save over the next 30 years to get to $2.4 million, assuming 8% a year? The landing lights are on you can start to plan your life. I'm not going to get there. I can't save this much.

I got kids in college. Okay. When do your kids go to college? Can you take that burn down to 80 grand by moving to Mexico City or Costa Rica or to St. Louis? But you have the advantage of knowing your path. Ideally, you have a career where you can make some money and start saving a little bit. Ideally, you have a partner where you can get alignment around working together to get that financial security. But most people in their 40s are under the impression their life is over.

I mean, they're probably going to live to be over 100. And so, okay, so you don't have 80 years, you only have 60 years left. But you still probably got another 30 years working and making money. And you kind of know what you need, right? So I think there's advantages at every age. But there's notion that it's too late for me. I'm in my 40s. I'm going to ignore finances.

Oh, bullshit. You just need to have an adult conversation with yourself. Do you think it makes sense then to go kind of risk on when you're young and then go diversified once you're older? Because you just want to highlight there for people that are, you know, like I was when I was 18, to kind of go all in and to make those big bets when you have nothing to lose. And the minute you have something to lose, whether that's your mortgage, you know, you've got children to take care of, or now you've got wealth to then go risk off. Is that the kind of approach you would suggest to life? I think generally speaking, you can't be as risk aggressive

when you have kids. When you're younger, look, if you screw up here, you're, you're, You're likable enough that you can probably find couches to live on for two years if you needed to. If you just got in over your skis, you could find a way to dance. When you're young, you can dance between the raindrops. I lived in New York. I had two roommates. When I started my business, my girlfriend paid our rent because I didn't have kids or dogs. There's just a certain level of responsibility and things you've got to take care of as you get older.

When you get a little bit older, don't go all in on anything. If you're going to start a business, use other people's capital, ring-fenced. Don't get seduced into the worst thing that can happen in our 30s and 40s is you start a business and you start failing slowly. You just don't know. The worst type of business is one that gives you just enough green signals that you keep investing more time and more money. Red envelope, people, that's what people know me for. That's the worst thing that can happen to somebody because it failed slowly. It failed over 11 years. I started an e-commerce incubation. I started an e-commerce incubator in New York, backed by Goldman Sachs, Maveron, J.P. Morgan. It was out of business in

eight months because of the dot-com meltdown. That's a blessing. The best thing that can happen to success, the second best thing is fast failure. The worst thing that can happen to you is slow failure. You can't have slow failure in your 30s and 40s. So you want to make sure that if you go in on something, you ring fence it. I'm leaving my job. I'm going to try and start my own business. I'm going to spend two years doing it. A certain amount of capital, no more than maybe 10, 20 percent of my capital because hitting a wall and failing at 50 is is much more devastating than hitting a wall or failing at 25 or 30. You can get up again. You're fine. You can press the restart button a bunch of times. So you want to take advantage of that in your 20s and 30s and workshop a bunch of

things. I'm not saying hop around. I'm not saying, oh, I don't love this. It's not my passion. No, that probably means it's just work. But if you're not making progress, if you're not making money, if you're not getting roles in films, if you're not, if everything's just really hard, really hard, you're in a position at that age to say, you know what, I'm going to leave Milan and move to Munich or I'm going to Dubai. You have flexibility when you're young. You have geographic flexibility. Lean into your advantage. It's a heck of a lot easier right now to make money in Dubai than it is in Caracas, right? You'd rather be good in a great economy than outstanding in a mediocre economy. You have geographic flexibility. Lean into your advantages, your flexibility, your

ability to recover, your ability to workshop. What would you do if one of your sons said to you, how many sons have you got now? I got two. You got two sons. That I know of. One of your sons comes to you and says, dad, I would like to be a, I've read your book, all of your books and I think they're great, but dad, I would love to be a professional actor. And then your other son came to you and said, I want to be a musician. I don't want to crush anybody's dreams. Go for it. I'll be supportive.

But this industry, let's just look at the economics. Musician and acting has a 99% unemployment rate. So you've got to be in the 1%. And I want you to set up benchmarks for determining what it means to be in the top 1%. Right? The most talented actors in the world are in a union called SAGAFRA. And by the way, it's not easy to get your union card. You've got to be in a Broadway play.

You've got to be recognized. That's a big moment. It's like getting your PGA tour card, right? You get your SAG after card. It means you wanted the 180,000 most talented creatives in the world. Last year, 83% of them didn't have health insurance because they didn't make more than $23,000. So you not only need to be in the top 17% just to have health insurance, you probably need to be in the top 10%, realistically, the top 1%. I know a lot of working actors.

If I said, this is the guy from this show, you'd be like, Oh my God, that guy's amazing. He's not making a lot of money. I mean, everybody talks about Tom Cruise. The majority of working actors, you would say, I know that woman, I know the man, they're great. They make an okay living. If they had achieved that level of excellence in almost any other industry,

they'd be, they'd own a house and a second house in a BISA. So if you want to be an athlete, an actor, a model, an artist, open a restaurant, open a nightclub, have a jewelry line, and be a fashion designer. I don't want to crush anyone's dreams. Let's have a sober conversation that if you aren't getting bright green lights that you're in the top 1% really quickly,

and we put some guardrails on it, we're going to do this for two years, three years, can't pay your rent in two or three years. Dad's going to stop paying your rent at some point, or maybe I'll continue to pay your rent, but I need you to start workshopping another career. Because here's the thing. Young people oftentimes mistake their hobbies

further passions. And what I would suggest is, and what I can guarantee you, is being successful at anything, passion comes from mastery. Pastry comes from being a ninja at something. I'm renovating a house, and there's this guy installing our soapstone, who's the soapstone guy. He's an Iraqi immigrant, dropped out of high school. He knows everything about soapstone. He can talk to you about the vein in the soapstone and which quarries. And he makes, I've been very open with him. I've talked about my book. He made 1.3 million pounds last year. He's the soapstone guy. I can't imagine when he was a kid. He and I bonded over football. I would bet, I don't know this, I would bet he'd dreamt of being a football star and playing for Iraq in the World

Cup at some point. I doubt at the age of 17, he thought, my, I'm hoping in 15 years, I'm installing soapstone and renovations for American douchebags and marlabone. I can't imagine that was his dream, right? But here's the thing. He has an amazing life. He takes care of his kids. He takes care of his parents. He gets to take amazing vacations with his wife, which makes him passionate about soapstone. So yeah, go be a fashion designer. But let's be honest, if you're not making enough money to pay your rent within two years and you're not making enough money to, say, form a family in five years, we're going to workshop something else. This requires such a mindset shift in the current world because obviously the slot machine, the casino, the Las Vegas of validation is Instagram and TikTok.

Now, if I announce on Instagram that I'm a tax lawyer for the next 10 years, it's not a great Instagram. It's not going to increase my chance of getting laid either. But if I say that I am, I don't know, if I say that I'm part of Chelsea Football Club, I'm in the junior academy, or if I say that I'm starting a business, I'm probably going to get laid more in the next 10 years. Well, the only pushback I would get is that you have to be one of the 10 best soccer players in the world that year to play for Chelsea. That is really hard. That is really, that means you're the best player in Senegal and then you go. I mean, you just have to be godlike talented.

The best 10% of tax lawyers, that's tens of thousands of them, fly private. and get laid more than you think, because they fly private and they can afford, they can find someone and give them a wonderful life. So, I mean, look, in a capitalist, I'm not saying this is how the world should be, I'm saying this how the world is. Economic security provides you with all sorts of opportunities

for experiences, for relationships, for romantic opportunities. And it is sexy to be great at anything and get economic security from anything. And I can't tell you, I love taking care of my kids because at one point I was worried about my ability to take care of my kids and not worry about it. And this is where happiness comes from. It's great to be in a prestige industry and be a baller. I get reward from some of the fame. I have right now. I'm sure you get reward from it. But the thing that is really rewarding

as you get older is I can lean into my relationships with my sons. And I don't have that economic fear I had the first time my son came marching out of my girlfriend. That is so rewarding. I can take care of my dad. I don't have to worry about it. My dad's 90 going to be 94 in a few weeks, and he lives in a really nice home, and he has a full-time kind of health aid. And it's about a quarter of a million dollars a year to take care of my dad. And if you look at, okay, that's post-tax. There's no tax credit for it. So it's about $400,000 in pre-tax income. My sister, who does really well, but not as well as me, we have a great partnership. She handles it logistically, I handle the money. And being able to do that and not have it be a source of stress

in my life and know that my dad is taken care of well, okay, it would be great to be a football player. Trust me, when you get to my age, that feels really good. That feels really nice. And the means to the ends, the money is a means. It's really important. It's hard to be happy in a capitalist society with economic stress. The resting blood pressure of kids in low-income homes is higher than kids in middle and upper-minute because they sense the anxiety for mom and dad. I remember, you know, losing my jacket when I was in the eighth grade and it was going to be just a horrible day because I had to go home and tell my mom jackets cost $33.3 all in my head very upsetting. The ability to take care of your kids, your parents do wonderful things. Money affords you

so many wonderful things that getting to a certain level of economic security is the means. But the ends, the reason you get to economic securities is so you can free up and be free of anxiety and have some additional time so you can focus on the ends. And the ends is deep and meaningful relationships. I spend the majority of my money on travel and experiences with my family and friends. I spend a shit ton of money and I absolutely love it. There's no reason to hoard money. Once I hit my number, I hit my number seven years ago, and I started thinking, I could be a billionaire. What was your number? My number was 100 million. By the way, my number when I got out of college was a million. And then by my 30s, I thought, well, if I had 10 million, I'm done. And then things

got so expensive. And my greed glance kept going. And my number was 100 million. Why have a number? Why did people listening need to create a number? What's the value of having that sort of line in the Well, you need a goal and you need to be thoughtful about how much money you're going to need. So if you figure out I'm going to need 80,000 pounds a year to live, the definition of rich is having a ton of shit and impress your friends. The definition of wealth is knowing that the passive income that you would get from growth from your stocks or dividends or incomes or rental income is greater than your burn. So you work out of option or you work because you want to, not because you need to. the definition of wealth. So having a number is just backward integrating into, okay, I want to have at least $3 million a year to live the life I want to live. Assuming a 4% return, that means I need

$75 million. So I rounded up to $100 million, right? I got exceptionally lucky to get there. By the way, see above in 2008, I was broke. I was broke at the age of 4243. That did not feel good. I got very lucky, started a company, bull market the last 16 years, right place, right time, exceptionally lucky. But you should be able, you should have a number. You should say this is the amount of money I need. And once I get to this number, enjoy it and start giving it away. We really need to, because I'm thinking about the lens that I kind of think about this conversation

through is like different stages in my own journey and the advice that I would have wanted from you at different steps in my journey. And I just flashed back to working in those call centers where I was missing. making just about enough money to, well, to be fair, if I'm being completely honest, I did have disposable income, but when I was poor, I was reckless with my money. So I would get the 500-pound disposable income on payday, leave the call center, go and buy a 400-pound TV, flat-screen TV, and put it in a room where the TV was as big as the wall of my room. And I'm trying to, I'm really trying to zoom in on that person who is so far away from nine figures. And they're like,

okay, Scott, Scott Galloway. So what is the set of steps or the mindset that, fishing rod I need in my mind to become Scott Galloway, nine figures. Well, the first is, the first is some of it is luck. Again, a lot of my successes. If I'd been born in Europe, I don't think I'd have that number. Europe's not as forgiving of entrepreneurs if you failed. I've had a lot of failure. If I lived in China, I think there's a decent chance I'd be in jail. So the smart, again, the smartest thing I've ever done was being born in California. So you're saying to move? Does that matter? What's that? Should I move city? Oh, if you're young, the first thing you want to do is to get to one of 20 super cities. If you're

I'm just talking about someone who wants me an economic animal, right? You might. Who doesn't? Okay, but some people might say, Scott, it's your way, it's not the right way. I want to teach coach football in my little village outside in the Amalfi Coast. I can make $55,000 euros working, running a small bakery and have a really nice life. I don't think they would have clicked. More power to you.

That's not the majority of the people I hang out with. The majority of the young people I hear from realize that capital, the wealth equals relevance and love in a capitalist society, and they want to be economically very secure. The easiest thing, the best piece of advice is, one, get credentialed. We live in a LinkedIn economy. What you did, your success is especially impressive because on average, people who get a college degree earn 50 to 100 percent more over the coast of their life. There's an entire set of industries that are off limits to people that don't have credentialing. I worked to work for Morgan Stanley.

We not only didn't hire people without college degrees, we didn't hire people that didn't go to one of eight universities when I applied. Eight. You had to not only go to college, you had to go to one of eight colleges to get a job at Morgan Stanley at that time. So if you can get credentialing, the second thing, not everyone's cut out for college, I get that. The second thing is get to a super city. Two-thirds of all economic growth over the next 30 years is going to take place in one of 20 cities. So if you're in that small town in Italy, you want to get to Milan as quickly as possible. And then if you can, you want to get to London as quickly as possible or Munich or a bigger city.

And then quite frankly, if you have total geographic agility and flexibility, ignoring the ridiculous INS of the U.S., you want to get to New York or San Francisco. Because to be good in San Francisco is much better than being amazing in Stuttgart. The amount of economic – here's the thing. I'm a mediocre surfer. I've actually even given it up. But when I was young and I used to go to Hawaii and the waves were perfect, I started believing I was a good surfer

where I go to Aspen after a fresh coat of snow. I'm like, I'm a decent skier. No, you're not. The snow and the waves are fucking amazing. Anyone could be a good skier in this shit. Get to where the waves and the snow are amazing. And that's generally speaking in cities. And when you're young, you can be in a city

because you can live in a 400 square foot apartment. You can be out of the house all day. You can dance between the raindrops and make money. But when you are in a city, you know how when you play tennis, if you play with someone much better than you, it elevates your game? When you're in a city, you're playing against Serena Williams every day. Everyone is smart. Everyone is well-dressed.

Everyone is working hard. Everyone is taking chances. And you are surrounded by people who are very successful. And you are going to bump off professional and personal opportunity every day. do it while you're young because when you start collecting dogs and kids, as I did in my 30s, I could no longer afford to stay in New York. So I had to move to Delray Beach in Florida. When I say, have to, we have a wonderful life down there.

There's not a fraction of the opportunities in Delray Beach for someone in their 20s and 30s. Now, I already had professional momentum, but Sunday to Thursday night, I was commuting to New York, because that's where the action was. So one credentialing, but two, absolutely get to one of 20 super cities. When you say 20 super cities, I'm thinking now, we're having this conversation in a world where AI seems to be the biggest topic of conversation. It seems to be ripping up many industries. But I also reflect on that. And I go, where is the AI opportunity going to be? If that is the biggest wave coming into shore in terms of opportunity, should I be playing my sort of geographical decision making based on artificial intelligence? Because everyone's raving about how big of an opportunity that is. And technology generally over the next 10 years seems like it's really going to eat up a lot of a, industry. Yeah, I don't know if it would be possible to determine geography based on AI. What I would say is, okay, you know, literally a third of my class, NYU, they get on a plane for San Francisco the day they graduate. There's just within a seven mile radius of San Francisco International

Airport, there's been more wealth created, I think, in the last six months than Germany's created in the last decade. Invidia is worth more than the entire UK stock. market. In videos, they make the, they're basically, they make the brains for artificial intelligence. They make a GPU, which is essentially a microchip that powers all of AI right now. And no one can buy them fast enough. Now, they have 30,000 people. I would bet 10 or 15,000 of them are worth at least $10 million now. Because, because the 30,000 employees get stock options. And when a company goes from, from 300 billion to $3 trillion, it means everyone is getting, rich. That doesn't happen that often in Dortmund. It doesn't happen that often. It doesn't happen.

I'm being kind, right? You grow up in Ingolstadt. You either go to work for Audi. Nothing wrong with that. Make a good living. But if you're young and you think, I really want to get in front of the biggest waves, you want to go to one of several cities. You want to have the winds at your back. So if you're young, what do you have? You have agility geographically. But going back, you initially ask me, what's the algorithm? What are the steps? And I tried to, the books called The Algebra wealth, I try to distill it down to a small number of features. The first is focus. Go all in on something, once you find, you workshop in your 20s, once you find something you're really good at, that you could be in the top 1% at. And here's the key part, as we referenced before,

that has a 90 plus percent employment rate. And 90% of industries have that. But if you can be in the top 10% of an industry that has a 90 plus percent employment rate, you're going to make really good money. First thing, focus. Try not to have side hustles. If you have a side hustle, it means your main hustle isn't working. You side hustle to workshop new main hustles, but once you find something you're really good at, go all in on it. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.