The Rich Roll Podcast - Scott Galloway on Healthy Masculinity, How to Achieve Financial Security, & Why Vulnerability Is Power

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

This week, I am joined by Scott Galloway, NYU professor, best-selling author, serial entrepreneur, and podcaster, to discuss the multifaceted challenges many young men face today. He underscores the lack of empathy and understanding many experience, attributing it to societal expectations and the impact of technology. Scott emphasizes the winner-take-most economy, which limits opportunities for many young men. Drawing from personal understanding, he stresses the importance of education, support, and the presence of positive male role models. The discussion encompasses economic challenges, the decline of mentorship programs, and the need for reform in higher education institutions. Addressing societal constructs of masculinity and the importance of vulnerability and integrity, Scott advocates embracing emotions and seeking help to navigate life’s hurdles. He stands apart as a model of healthy, grounded masculinity—one defined by humility, emotional intelligence, and a commitment to uplifting the collective rather than indulging narrow self-interest. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up  Today’s Sponsors: Eight Sleep: Intelligent cooling and heating for any bed 👉EightSleep.com/RICHROLL On: Use code RichRoll10 at the checkout to get 10% OFF your first order of high-performance shoes and apparel 👉on.com/richroll  Momentous: Save up to 36% OFF your first subscription order of Protein or Creatine, along with 20% OFF my favorite products 👉livemomentous.com/richroll  Peak Design: 20% OFF thoughtfully crafted, best-in-class backpacks, duffels, & more 👉PeakDesign.com/RICHROLL Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 15% OFF my favorite wellness products 👉boncharge.com 

We're raising a generation of men who are going to be increasingly psychotic and crazy. That was ugly. That is like, yeah, it's so depressing. What does healthy masculinity look like? Masculinity is an amazing thing. You shouldn't apologize for it. You should lean into it. But what does it mean?

We've conflated toxicity with masculinity. There are so many lonely young men who don't have any interaction with people, very susceptible to anything or any algorithm giving them a sense of self-worth. I would have been one of those guys today, angry, upset. So I relate. My guest today is Scott Galloway. Scott is a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business. He's a best-selling author. He's also the host of the Prof G podcast and co-host of the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher. Masculinity is a societal construct, and a lot of women demonstrate wonderful masculinity. It's not the domain of people born as men.

In urban areas now in the U.S., women under the age of 30 are making more money than men. And by the way, that's wonderful. We should do nothing to get in the way of that. Women are, I think, ready for more economically and emotionally viable young men. So the question is, how do we level up young men? Scott, thank you for doing this. I know it's a schlep to come out here. I appreciate you making the time.

I've been looking forward to this for a very long time. And there's so much to talk about. You're such an interesting figure. You're at the intersection of business and entrepreneurship advice. You're sort of this really smart cultural critic, pundit on tech, the reformation of higher education, and also self-help. of higher education and also self-help. You have this really sagacious facility for counsel that's aimed broadly, but also very specifically this particular lens on young men and this concern that you have for the next generation. And I think the sentiment behind it is really that we have a demonstrable problem with males in the next generation, the culture of men,

the evolution of men, the growth of men, who they are, where and how they are being guided or not being guided and how they're being distracted or led astray in a way that's really interfering with their growth and their potential and in turn, like the growth of a healthy society. Yeah. Well, first off, thanks for the kind words. I think I said when I came in, we went through all the podcast invites we have and I just mentioned your name and before I even finished it, like half my staff, we just went ape shit.

You deeply resonate with a lot of people. I appreciate that. Yeah, look, this is something that I'm passionate about. I think the data is overwhelming. Three times as likely to be addicted, four times as likely to kill themselves as women, 12 times likely to be incarcerated, 70% of opioid overdose.

We don't have a homeless problem. We don't have an opioid problem. We don't have an incarceration problem. We have a male suicide, homeless, and incarceration problem. And if any other special interest group were committing suicide at four times the rate of the control group, we would talk about it in different terms. We would talk about the need for social programs, intervention, empathy. But when something like this happens to

young men, there's a lack of empathy. You hear words like accountability, or if they were just more in touch with their emotions. And I think that's really gotten in the way of a productive conversation. And because there hasn't been a productive conversation and people out there feel and see what's going on, some voices have entered into that void that are sort of unproductive voices. And sometimes that kind of this pro-man rhetoric oftentimes is just simply veiled misogyny or a lack of empathy or kind of what I'll call the manosphere. It starts off fine.

It's be action oriented, be fit, take control. Then it goes to really weird places that treats women as property or talks about immigrants taking your job or just sign up for my crypto university. It just goes to weird places. just sign up for my crypto university. It just goes to weird places. It's also been a bit of a third rail issue to raise the peril of the wayward young man in a world in which the conversation around elevating certain sectors of culture and society is about women and people of color. And yet the quote that I've heard you often repeat is, the most dangerous person in the world is a man that is broken and alone. If you look globally, the most unstable violent societies in the world all have one thing in common.

They have a disproportionate amount of young men with a lack of economic or romantic prospects. What do we do? We send them off to war. If they don't have economic prospects internally, they'll overthrow the government. So we find conflict and we send them off to war. Also, this younger generation of men is paying for the unfair advantage you and I had growing up. I was born in Los Angeles or Southern California in 1964. I hit the lottery. You know, being born a white heterosexual male just had huge advantage in California. Myself as well. I was born in 66. You went to UCLA. I went to Stanford. I'm

the beneficiary of, you know, an incredible education and privilege. And now that, you know, access to what you and I had access to is all the more remote these days. Like what is going on? Like how did we get to this place? What are the tectonic plates that have led us to this situation that we find ourselves in? So just to make the point around accessibility, I don't know the numbers in Stanford, but when I applied to UCLA in 1982, the acceptance rate was 76% and it cost $1,200 a year. And I had to apply twice and I got in. The acceptance rate this year will be 9% and it's $34,000. So it's just inaccessible to anyone who's not remarkable. Remarkable or rich. So how did we get here?

I think there's been a variety of things, a confluence of factors that have all collided around young men. One, there's just a lack of empathy. People see it as a zero-sum game where if you feel empathy for men, it must mean that you are anti-women. And so there's a lack of empathy and what I call zero-sum gaming. Civil rights didn't hurt white people. It helped them. Gay marriage doesn't hurt heteronormative marriage. It enhances it. So to talk about empathy for young men is in no way and should in no way be seen as anti-women.

I think the group that wants more viable young men is first and foremost mothers. That's who I hear from the most who see what's going on with their daughters and the difference between their daughters and their sons. And also women. Women are, I think, ready for more economically and emotionally viable young men. Women are dating older and older because they're having trouble finding what they would perceive as viable young men. So a few things. One, just biological. Men's prefrontal cortex matures later. They just don't have the same executive function or adult in the room. They're less mature, literally less mature.

Two, we have an education system that is biased against them. If you talk about the behaviors we reward in school, you're essentially gonna describe a girl. Be organized, be a pleaser, sit still. You also have an education industrial complex. 92% of kindergarten teachers are women. There's more female per capita fighter pilots than male kindergarten teachers. It's about 70, 80% K through six and about 60, 70% in high school. And naturally you're going to empathize

with a little version of you. So I just don't think there's the same level of empathy for young men. We've also done away with metal shop, auto shop, wood shop. So the guy who's not cut out for college, who doesn't sit still, who's not academically focused, has fewer and fewer on-ramps into a middle-class lifestyle. And then these guys get into the workforce, there's fewer middle-class trades jobs. In America, parents have done a really good job of convincing themselves they've failed as a parent if their kid doesn't end up at Stanford or UCLA. So there's a lot of rage and shame in the household. There's not visible on-ramps into a healthy middle-class life. 3% of LinkedIn profiles in

America say apprentice. It's 11% in the UK and Germany. 50% of Germans have some sort of vocational certification. That's not true here. It's kind of become this, you either get to Stanford or UCLA or you and your parents have failed. And then a lot of dynamics, dating apps, where you have two, three to one men to women. And you also have this effect where because everyone has access to everyone, not everyone, but women who have a much finer filter are all drawn to the kind of what I call same guy. So you have 50 men on Tinder, 50 women, 46 of those women will show all of their attention

and interest to just four guys. So it's great to be in the top 10% on a dating app if you're a guy. The bottom 90, it's really difficult. And the bottom half of men on dating apps, where now one and two relationships begin, get validation that they have absolutely no worth in the dating market. So a lack of economic prospects, a lack of maturity, a society that doesn't seem to have a lot of empathy for them, and then a mating market that validates they don't have a lot of value. And you see these men go down this downward spiral where they start. And this is where you know we've really lost them.

They start becoming ultra-nationalist. They start blaming immigrants. They start blaming women. They become prone to conspiracy theory. And some, they just become really shitty citizens. And the final thing I would say is that the most profitable, valuable companies in the world have one thing in common. And that is they're tapping into a lack of regulation and instinctive flaws. Men are more risk aggressive.

So the fastest growing technology sector right now is gaming, which is a polite way of saying gambling. Men are more risk aggressive. They like to gamble. 85% of gamblers are men. They're four to six times more likely to develop a gambling addiction. You then put it on a phone and you have Kevin Hart and Charles Barkley telling you that you're smart and you should bet on March Madness. And then you have social media apps or Robin Hood or Meta or YouTube sort of tapping into these instincts, these flawed instincts of men, where they become

prone to conspiracy theory, much more risk aggressive, much more inclined to develop a relationship with you porn, as opposed to saying, okay, how do I go out there and develop the skills and the game and the economic and emotional viability to find my own romantic partner? economic and emotional viability to find my own romantic partner. They're mistaking Reddit and Discord for friendship. They're mistaking Robinhood and Coinbase for making a living. They're mistaking YouPorn for establishing a relationship. And so a lot of these men have had the real world or the motivation to find real relationships replaced with algorithms and screens. It's a low entry, low risk cost of having a reasonable facsimile of life. And if you're not careful, you wake up a few

years later, you don't have those skills and you're depressed. Because getting out and finding a job, getting out, going into work, getting up, putting on a tie, learning how to read the room, learning how to make a woman laugh, establish body language, be persistent, endure rejection. You know, there's a reason romantic comedies are two hours, not 15 minutes. This shit is hard and it's humiliating, but that's what real victory in real life looks like. And I think there's a disproportionate or a small number of young men who are ever going

to experience that real joy and that real victory because of the low cost, low entry, reasonable facsimile of life that these companies prey on. That's a pretty dire portrait of the current state of affairs, the eradication of opportunity, the lack of adequate on-ramps to higher education and the confluence of all these technologies that are conspiring to capture the attention of the young male and channel it in unhealthy ways, is going to leave that individual not just depressed, but angry and looking for an outlet for that anger. Well, there's an upside. If you're in the top 10%, life's never been better. We're in a Hunger Games economy.

The winner leads a remarkable life, and everybody else dies a slow death. If you have your shit together as a young man, and you have the discipline to get the right certification, the graduates in my class at Stern, I teach the MBA, their average salary is $212,000. They go on a dating app, they're gonna get a ton of attention.

Their opportunities have never been of attention. Their opportunities have never been more exceptional. Their vacations, their ability to take care of their parents at a young age, their economic opportunity, their chance to make millions is within reach by the time of 30. Those opportunities did not exist for our parents. So it's become sort of a winner take most environment. So it's great to be in the top 10%, but I can prove to all of us that 90% of our sons are not in the top 10%. And when you think about, it goes back to me, like what is America supposed to be? And the reason I've got involved here, I was in that bottom 90. I was probably in that bottom 50. Is America about identifying the remarkable

or identifying the children of rich people and turning them into billionaires? Is that what America is supposed to do? My view is America is about identifying or giving everyone in the bottom 90 a shot to be in the top 10%. That's how it was when I grew up. I was unremarkable. I think that when I look at you, I see somebody, I mean, you're clearly passionate about this. This is a very mission-based, service-oriented kind of endeavor that you found yourself in. And you're somebody who's had many successes in different areas of life. You have economic independence. You could choose to be doing lots of different things. And you've chosen through all of the ways that you show up publicly in Prof G Media and the podcasting, et cetera, to really focus your

advocacy around this. And it strikes me as very earnest and heartfelt. Like this really is a mission that you're passionate about. I don't know that much about you, Rich, but I was that guy. You know, I didn't have a lot of money, no romantic prospects, but America loved me, right? Free education, remarkable institution, great job. A chance to get economically viable, chance to take care of my mother. I would have been one of those guys today. Angry, upset. So I relate.

Yeah. Your mother was an integral figure in all of this. Yeah, look, the reason I'm here with you now, it's easy to credit your grit and your character for your success and blame the market for your failures. I get to come here and I get to bomb out of here and go to the Beverly Hills Hotel and have like a, you know, do whatever the fuck I want

and, you know, have an incredible life because of one, the generosity and vision of California taxpayers and the Regents University of California, who said our job is to give unremarkable kids a remarkable opportunity. Being born at the right place at the right time and the unconditional love of my mother, right?

Single immigrant mother, lived and died a secretary. But you know, every day told me that I was wonderful. And I think that stuck with me. But yeah, like, I don't know what your relationship was like with your parents, but if you think about investing, there's some basics, right? You invest a little bit of money,

compound interest is just this remarkable thing. Most people feel that the singular relationship in their life, if they're asked to identify the singular relationship in their life, they usually more often than not, number one is their mother. And it's because she made those tiny little investments in you every day, waking you up with a soft voice,

worried about you, could hear you get up when you were a kid and come in and comfort you. Every day, just dozens of little investments. And your mom wakes up and you wake up when you're older, regardless of whether you don't get along, maybe you don't even like each other, but it's a singular relationship. And I think a lot about the relationship, how powerful it was for me. And what was really wonderful about my mom, she had the foresight to get a lot of men involved in my life. Because if you look at the single point of failure in a young man's life, it's when he loses a male role model. And it's interesting because we have the second most single parent homes in

the world behind Sweden. And when we say single parent, 92% of the time, that means it's a single mother. And what's interesting is the data shows that the daughters of single mothers have the same outcomes, same college attendance, same income, same rates of self-harm. Boys, once they lose their male role model, immediately become dramatically more likely

to be incarcerated, dramatically less likely to graduate from high school, dramatically more likely to be incarcerated, dramatically less likely to graduate from high school, dramatically more likely to suffer from addiction. What it ends up is that while boys are physically stronger, they're emotionally and mentally much weaker. Just because you say it's really important that a boy have a man involved in his life, that's in no way diminishing the superheroes that are single mothers. But I think we have to acknowledge that it is really important that men be involved. And that's the problem with schools now that don't have enough men, because there's an entire generation of young men that go through their lives until they're 25 with absolutely no men involved.

And if you have kids, you see that occasionally dad just plays a bigger role, his physical size, his voice, whatever it might be. And I'm thinking a lot about masculinity. I think the ultimate expression of masculinity is I've got my shit sewed together. I can take care of myself. I can take care of my immediate family. I can take care of my kids, the people I work with. I pay good taxes. But the ultimate expression of masculinity is getting involved in the life of a boy that isn't yours. And unfortunately, Michael Jackson and Catholic Church have fucked it up for all of us and created this weird notion that if you're a guy your age and you're super successful, you might have love to give and you might see a 15-year-old

boy that could use your help and it feels unnatural to get involved in his life. And that's not true. Yeah, the culture of mentorship has waned to say the least. And, you know, I And it feels unnatural to get involved in his life. And that's not true. Yeah, the culture of mentorship has waned to say the least. And I think it's fair to say that America was built on the idea of apprenticeship and mentorship, but that culture seems to have evaporated. Like where are the mentors? Where are the sage councils and the healthy masculine men who are helping to guide

the next generation? Well, I got it from coaches, but a lot of kids aren't going to church though. They used to get it from the reverend or the rabbi. Community-oriented programs have gone away. What are the rates of young men in sports? Is it the way that it was when we were kids? Are less young men participating in sports? And where are the other healthy outlets for the young men in need of mentorship? So sports is like most things. There's still the same level of participation, but unfortunately it's been crowded towards the wealthy.

Engaging in a sport has become not a luxury item, but pretty close. Even if you look at the college athletes, outside of basketball and football, it's disproportionately rich kids. Because if your kid wants to play lacrosse, to send them to lacrosse camps or her to lacrosse camps and get them the right training and the right equipment,

it's just expensive. But I think sports and after-school programs are being cut. But going to solutions, I think there's a ton of solutions. So starting boys a year late in elementary school, they're just less mature. The worst thing that happened to me or almost happened to me is my parents wanted me to skip a grade because it was back in the space race. And if you were offered the opportunity to skip a grade, that meant you were going to be at work for NASA. I showed up at UCLA at the age of 17, and I was way too immature to handle the alcohol and the pressure of it all. Started a year later, trying to create greater

incentives to get more men in primary and secondary high school and elementary school, more vocational programming. There's just a ton of jobs in the real economy for specialty construction, specialty nursing. Anyone who's renovating a house knows that a roofer makes really good money, much less a plumber, and stop shaming those jobs, start elevating them. I think we have to level up young people in general. There's been an enormous transfer of wealth from young people to old people.

Specifically, people under the age of 40 used to control 19% of the GDP in terms of their wealth. It's been cut to 9%. The average 70-year-old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. The average person under the age of 40 is 24% less wealthy. And that affects women and men, but it's disproportionately affecting men because men are fairly or unfairly evaluated from a mating perspective based on their economic viability. The best example of, I think, that depicts this, the greatest innovation in history wasn't the iPhone or a semiconductor. It was the American middle class. Bought wars, pushed back on fascism,

paid an enormous amount of taxes, was innovative, came up with DARPA, came up with vaccines, came up with GPS. And where it all started was 7 million men returned from World War II, and they demonstrated excellence in uniform. And the government said, we're going to make a massive investment in them in terms of the GI Bill and the highway construction bill. We're going to give them jobs. We're going to give them economic viability. And quite frankly, they were just very attractive.

And they had an easier time finding mating, finding a house, two-car garage. And it set off the baby boom. And it set off a generation of confident, loving kids who were comfortable and said, all right, it's time for civil rights. It's time to bring women into the workforce. It's time for women's rights. And it just set off this kind of post-World War II, liberal, progressive society, the likes of which we've never seen that type of prosperity. But the middle class is an accident. It doesn't self-sustain. The incumbents and people on the far right will claim that the middle class is a self-repairing organism. It's not.

It's an anomaly. Middle classes have never existed in society before. We figured it out. But unless you have economically and emotionally viable men, you can't have a middle class. So the question is, how do we level up young men? And I don't think you can just have affirmative action for men. I think that's too political. But I do think we have to put more money into the pockets of young people who have seen a transfer of wealth. And I'll touch a third rail here. Every year, we transfer one and a half trillion dollars. The greatest economic transfer in history happens every year, from young people to the wealthiest generation in history, senior citizens, and it's called Social Security. And it just is insane that this group that is consistently seeing their wealth and on an inflation-adjusted basis, their livelihood go down and down and down, transfer money to the wealthiest population in the world.

So let's talk more about economics. Mortgage tax deduction and capital gains are the two biggest deductions in our tax code. Who makes their money selling stocks and selling assets? Guys my age. Who makes their money with sweat? The guys in this room, the younger guys. Who owns homes? Older people. Who rents? Younger people. I feel like almost every economic policy is nothing but a thinly veiled transfer of wealth from the young to the old. And then the final one, the greatest intergenerational train robbery in history

was the CARES Act and the transfer of wealth during COVID. 85% of the money flushed into households was saved. It wasn't spent. So five of the $7 trillion wasn't spent on food or housing. It went into the markets, which absolutely sent the asset prices of real estate and stock markets screaming. Who owns homes and stocks? The incumbents and the old. The reason I'm rich

is because in 2008, the government let the economy crash. It bailed out banks, but it didn't bail out the economy. I had a little bit of money. I was coming into my prime income earning years. So I was able to buy Apple and Amazon and Netflix at seven, four, and 10 bucks, right? Yeah. Where the fuck do these guys put their money out? NVIDIA at $900 a share?

What do they buy a home in Agoura Hills, a cute ranch home for $2.3 million? a share? What do they buy a home in Agoura Hills, a cute ranch home for $2.3 million? When they bailed out me and the incumbents three years ago, all they were doing was robbing opportunity from young people. When you bail out the boomer who owns a restaurant, all you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 26-year-old female graduate of the Brooklyn Culinary Academy. She's not getting her shot. Churn and turnover are key to giving young people an opportunity. So we effectively decided during COVID was a million people dying would be bad, but letting the NASDAQ go down and making boomers less rich would be tragic.

It was pure theft. And who's going to have to pay for this shit? Not you or me. Them and their kids. Yeah. That doesn't bode well. Not you or me, them and their kids. That doesn't bode well. And then when you think about that in the context of increasing polarization and the kind of denigration of our public discourse and the increase in distrust in institutions matched with the lack of opportunity and everything that you just outlined, like, does America survive this?

Like, how are we going to get back to a place where we're providing adequate opportunity to young people and we're in a social contract with our brothers and sisters where we agree upon the things that are important to create a healthy culture that can survive and flourish as a democratic republic. Well, I mean, the ground zero, I think, for almost all of our problems, or the incendiary report on our problems, is that for the first time in our nation's history,

a 30-year-old man or woman isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at 30. That's never happened before. What's so upsetting about it is it's in the face of unprecedented prosperity. Five minutes post the earnings release of NVIDIA, it adds $240 billion in market capitalization, but we can't afford the child tax credit. Child tax credit between $24 and $40 billion immediately eliminated poverty for 40% of kids in food insecure homes.

Like, I didn't even think you could do that with $24 or $40 million. We spent $800 billion on our military, and I'm not suggesting we should reduce it. I think it's important we have a robust Defense Department. But what do you know? Social Security gets a 9% cost of living adjustment increase, and the child tax credit gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill. So we have elected representatives, average age 63. D.C. is a cross between the walking dead and the golden girls.

And if that sounds ageist, it is ageist. But here's the thing. Do they really relate to a 28-year-old who's trying to build a home with kids? And kids don't vote, and young people don't vote, but old people vote. So we're about to see for the first time in our nation's history, almost 50% of our entire federal budget be allocated towards seniors. And young people, as a result, just don't have as much opportunity. And they're not dumb. It pisses them off. They look up, they see us, they see the opportunities we had, they see how much

money is being spent on seniors. And then every day they're reminded that they're failing. They live in a society where algorithms are constantly telling them everyone else is rich. You failed. If you're not hanging out at the almond hotel or you're not flying private or you don't have a six pack or you don't have a hot boyfriend or hot girlfriend, you've failed. don't have a six pack or you don't have a hot boyfriend or hot girlfriend, you've failed. And you get these reminders every day. So I think these righteous movements around Black Lives Matter or Me Too, they are righteous movements, but every movement now has a ton of incendiary report on it because young people are just angry. They're just like, okay, my neighbor works at Google. She's killing it. I'm not in the top 1%. And the thing is,

we're as Americans, our superpowers are optimism, but we all believe our kid is going to be in that top 1%. And I just think we moved away from America, which used to be about giving unremarkable kids a remarkable opportunity to, we've decided, okay, let's elect a series of people who continue to transfer wealth from young people. And oh, wait, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropped out of college. That can happen. Well, okay. But most young people, if you look at the numbers, are having a tough time. We have the most anxious, depressed generation in history. One of the younger generations. Like, we have a tendency to believe that me and my colleagues are somehow more noble than the rest of the population.

And we sit around with our Labradors and our corduroy vests watching PBS thinking about how to make the world a better place. And there's some of that. I have remarkable colleagues who are good people, but we're like everybody else. And I think we wake up, a lot of administrators and leadership on campus wake up and ask themselves the same question every day when they look in the mirror. How do I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability? And we found the ultimate strategy. I call it the LVMH strategy. When I went to UCLA, the facilities were shitty. But 76% got in and it was $400.

And what they'd figured out is, I know, keep the admissions rates static and low. When the dean announces, we rejected 92% of our applicants this year at NYU, we stand up and we applaud. And the alumni love it because their degree goes up in value. And this same rejectionist LVMH strategy has been adopted across the larger economy. If you own a home, you get very concerned. You're in the Malibu Canyon. I bet any homeowner in the Malibu Canyon takes a real interest in new plans for new development, and they show up and they're very concerned and come up with thoughtful reasons why new developments never get the permits. And the result is we have a shortage every year of somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million houses

we need. And then you have big companies who weaponize government and create it harder and harder for small companies to emerge. So the result is the incumbents see their asset values increase, but people can't get into these schools. Harvard sits on a $53 billion endowment, which is the GDP of Costa Rica, and it's kept its freshman class at 1,500 kids. A good Starbucks serves 1,500 people. They could admit 15,000 and have no tax, absolutely no tax on their resources. So one of the solutions in my view is if you are not growing your freshman enrollment faster than population growth, you should lose your nonprofit status. And COVID provided the perfect opportunity to re-evaluate what you just shared and

create a situation through online education to broaden the aperture and make it accessible to so many more people. And we all know what happened. That didn't happen. It didn't. Yeah. I speak at a lot of corporations, a lot of big companies, and they'll say, what can we do? The first thing a corporation could do to make this better is to stop fetishizing graduates from elite universities. When I went to work for Morgan Stanley, they recruited at Stanford and Berkeley, and I was the first analyst they hired out of UCLA. UCLA wasn't good enough for them. And I fell into this trap. When I started my company, I fetishized hiring people. We only

hired people from Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, and for some reason, UVA. We had people from UVA. When you decide that, that you're only hiring from elite universities, you're saying, I'm not interested in single mothers. You're immediately excluding people who don't even have rich parents or freakishly remarkable. So my recommendation, I was talking to the CEO of Salesforce about this, move away from a certification-based hiring strategy to a skills-based strategy. How do you figure out the testing? And it's expensive and it's hard to hire really talented young people that based on their skills as opposed to their certification. Because the reason we have entered into this LVMH strategy at elite universities is that

corporations love it. People think our student is our consumer. No, our consumer is our product. Our consumer is the corporation. And the corporation is basically outsourced screening and hiring to these universities thinking if they're only letting in 8% of their applicants, they must be pretty good. So corporations moving to a certification saying 10%, 20%, 50% of our applicants.

And I'm not talking about admin jobs. I'm talking about professional track jobs are going to be reserved for people based on a skills-based assessment where it is certification blind. You couldn't get past the front desk without an elite university degree at Morgan Stanley when I was there.

Isn't tech a little bit different though? I feel like they are slightly more progressive in terms of how they hire because they are looking at skills and it's a bit more untethered from pedigree. Is that true? A little bit, especially around programming. But I would argue if you want a job in a traditional professional track in math or alphabet, it's pretty hard to get in without an elite university degree. And it's a self-reinforcing mechanism because they're so populated with people from amazing universities.

I mean, this goes back to why it's so important you get out of your house and that you're social. Because there was just a study done at Google and a hiring manager says, we put out a job opening for a product manager. We get immediately 200 resumes and we cut it down because we don't need more than 200. We decided to bring in 20 people. And of the 20 people, the hire we make is almost always someone who was referred internally. So if you want a job, you better have a lot of friends. But I don't know. I think tech is probably as big an offender. I think tech founders oftentimes don't have college degrees. If you're an AI engineer, okay, fine. you don't need a degree. But I would argue for the majority of the jobs, the professional track jobs, they still fetishize an elite college degree.

Part of getting young males out of the basement and into the world and face-to-face with people requires some modeling of that healthy behavior. And I think what's so potent about who you are and how you show up is that you're this really successful dude, but you're also like an alpha guy who's progressive, who's ribald at times, like you're not afraid to tell a dirty joke. You're strong, you're fit, and you know what you're talking about when you're talking about economics and social sciences, et cetera. Why aren't there more people like you? Well, you're being generous. Let's unpack that. Remember the Presidential Fitness Awards? Sure. I was going to figure out a way. I got a three years in a row, and then I hit a growth spurt

in the eighth grade, and I didn't get the badge badge and it was devastating for me. And I started doing pull-ups every day until I got back to seven pull-ups, which is what I needed. We have become so politically correct that we romanticize obesity. You're finding your truth. No, you're not. You're finding a fucking ventilator. I mean, that's not to say that we shouldn't have empathy. We shouldn't figure out programs to give people in food deserts opportunity to eat more healthy. But we should be celebrating fitness. One of the first things I say to men if I coach a young man, lean into your strengths as a man. We have superior or more dense bone structure, a lot more muscle, and then testosterone gets poured over it.

a lot more muscle, and then testosterone gets poured over it. I think any man under the age of 30 should be able to walk into any room and know that if shit got real, they could either kill and eat everybody or outrun them. And it's an amazing feeling. It's going to make you kinder. Who breaks up fights at bars? A big, strong man. Who is kinder? Who has an easier time finding mates?

Who wants to protect others? Who's going to be less depressed, make more money. Fitness and celebrating strength is a wonderful thing, especially for men. It's key. And then we have become so politically correct around potentially offending people. The people who are the most profane used to be the most liberal. Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, the most profane, used to be the most liberal. Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin. And on the far left, we become such snowflakes that anything, I think the thing that hurts people from being elected to implement many of the policies I'm promoting are that we're seen as humorless. Like at some point, we're going to get to celebrate our differences. I co-host a podcast

with Kara Swisher, who's a lesbian. I make fun of her sexual orientation. I make inappropriate jokes. And then there's a pause and she laughs and she gives everyone else permission to laugh. I think that's really important. Social media has created this infrastructure where you get guardian of gotcha points by if someone says something off color, you go after them. And I think it's awful. And I purposefully dial up the profanity because I'm like, for God's sakes, the left needs to take back profanity and vulgarity. That doesn't mean you're a bad person. But what you do is also matched with a compassion and a vulnerability. Because I think what you just shared is also the portal to bad influence on the internet, like make your bed, get fit, eat right,

show up when you say you're gonna show up. Those are all sound and solid principles. It's good advice. But too often that, as you were sharing earlier, is sort of the beginning of a slide into a darker world. And those influencers seem to commandeer too large of a percentage of the internet and capture the minds and the fascination of these wayward young men who are in search of good influence and just take what's available, what's showing up when they're scrolling on their feet? Like, why is it that those are the voices that rise to the top and a more grounded, you know, kind of kinder, more conscientious approach that you model isn't, you know, the one that's rising to the top? Or why aren't there more, you know, more people who are talking

about, you know, the warrior mindset, but from a perspective that the ultimate warrior never has to remove their sword from the sheath and is a protector of those that are weaker and is a compassionate force for the community. Well, unfortunately, again, thanks. I think you're being generous. We've conflated toxicity with masculinity. You don't hear the term masculine femininity. We've spent the last 30 or 40 years highlighting the wonderful things about feminine attributes. It's a celebration. It's wonderful. Women are doing so well. More single women own a home than a single man. It's now 60-40 female to male college grad enrollees, and it's about to go two to one college grads because men drop out. In urban areas now in the U.S., women under the age

of 30 are making more money than men. And by the way, that's wonderful. We should do nothing to get in the way of that. But also trying to find role models and trying to envision a new aspirational frame of masculinity that says masculinity is an amazing thing. You shouldn't apologize for it. You should lean into it. But what does it mean? And I'm writing a book on masculinity, and I'm trying to figure it out.

And quite frankly, it's really challenging. I think of it as loosely speaking, protector, provider, procreator. When you think about the jobs associated with masculinity, a cop, a fireman, I was at a hotel in Seattle and a fire alarm went off and these eight fire people showed up, seven men, one woman. They didn't ask if there was a fire. They didn't ask what was going on. They're like, what floor is this? And they got in the elevator and they went to seventh floor.

That's just it. If you look at 9-11, they weren't like, oh, this building's coming down. They just run into the building. They're like, our job is to protect others. I think that's a great place to start for men, that real masculinity is you are, your job is to protect other people. And it also

foots to our instincts. I think it's called the Carnegie Foundation gives out an award every year or awards for people who in the moment put their own physical safety at risk to save someone else they don't know. It's literally they're pulling people out of a burning car. What you're talking about is service. And I think a lot of the messaging around masculinity is about individuality. It's about going out and getting yours and killing the lion and getting the car and the job. It's all about kind of selfish aggrandizement in a showy, flashy sort of way to kind of peacock. But real masculinity is purpose-driven and service-oriented. How are you showing up for other people? But where I was going with this, of the 81 awards they gave last year, 77 were given to men. Men are more risk-aggressive. Men will rush out into

a field of combat to pull a comrade out who's shot, risking their own lives. Women tend to be more thoughtful. Women tend to be like, is that a good idea? And there's a role for both. And by the way, I'm making a reductive generalization. Masculinity is a societal construct. It's what we fill it with. And a lot of women demonstrate wonderful masculinity. It's not the domain of people born as men. One of those fire people was a woman. I go to CrossFit. I mean, the most impressive people in CrossFit are women, and we celebrate their strength. Personally, I'm drawn to men who are more feminine. My best friends demonstrate that kind of care, that nurturing, that grace.

So I think where it comes off the rails is you say only men can be masculine or people born as men. These are wonderful attributes. What I'm suggesting is that people born as men have an easier time leaning into these things and we should celebrate them. I think what you're saying around service is something I should think about because maybe that's a better frame. But protector, provider, the majority of men still are evaluated based on their ability to provide economically. And if we're going to have an honest conversation, we have to have an honest conversation. Three in four women say economic viability is a key criteria in a mate, a male mate, whereas it's less than a quarter of men.

We just don't really care, it appears. Well, maybe a wrinkle on service is the idea of contribution. Because I think self-esteem is bred through contributing. Are you being productive for something that's greater than yourself? I did ketamine therapy on Monday and I was trying to, I was trying to- Tell me more. Oh God, have you done it?

No, I haven't. No. I know some people that have though. Yeah. So I- What led to that? I call it the Burning Man effect. It's like, I've always been curious about Burning Man, but I've always chickened out and I've always wanted to do ketamine. And I was just curious about it. So a friend of mine is an investor in these clinics and basically set up my appointment while I was in Austin and it came up and I went. But I was trying to write down the takeaways for me. And Richard Reeves of Boys and Men fame has this great frame, and that is adding surplus value. I teach my boys, I'm like, you're negative value right now. Your mom spends a ton of time. We spend

a ton of money on you. We give you more love than you give us. You go to school. This incredible infrastructure is spending time and energy to educate you. I'm like, when you become a man is when you're doing enough for other people that you're adding surplus value. You're producing more than you're taking. I love that frame. At some point in the service of others, are you actually giving more than you're taking? You know, that's our economy is based on that. Companies that take in resources and then output more than the cost of the resources going in. I don't know how I thought of the ketamine therapy, but the only kind of real actionable item I took away from it was

like my boys kept coming up and I thought if I can love my boys more than people have loved me, if I can push more of that confidence and concern and love to other people, that's the real surplus value, right? And that was a nice framing for me. That's like, I wanted to come out with some intentionality around my purpose. That was what I took from it. It's like, I have these vessels that really are open and sponges of my time, regard, attention, and love. And if I think one of my purposes as a man is surplus value, is how can I do more of that for them than was done for me? I have a very complicated relationship with my father. He wasn't very good to me or my mom, but here's the thing. He was much better to me than his dad was to him. And I'm like, okay, he's checked the box in the

universe. He's added surplus value. But I think that's a great frame for men. Really think about young men, the resources, the government, your family, our society are investing in you. And at what point does it flip and you're actually adding more value than you're taking? And a lot of men never get there and grow up thinking that the world is just about giving them shit and spending time and love on them. I think that's a great frame for what it means to be a man. I also think that's why qualitatively, like what you're doing now in this chapter of your life, I suspect, and I'm projecting is so much more meaningful to you. Yes, it's a for-profit enterprise, Prof G Media,

but in comparison to being an activist investor or an investment banker or just an entrepreneur in general, the meaning behind it, the intentionality, the purpose, that seems to be very clear to you, gives it a sense of meaning that I would imagine contributes to your happiness and your sense of direction. Yeah, look, it's hugely rewarding. I'm not – I don't want to virtue too much. I'm a capitalist. I love money. I love making money. I think there's a huge economic opportunity in being the white space I feel commercially as a marketing professor, I can tell you is I'm a white heterosexual male that talks openly about his feelings. There's a huge white space for that. People respond to it. People respond to it. And so it's a frame. I make good money talking about this stuff, but the stuff around struggling young men is so rewarding because it's a conversation that has been unproductive. And by far the people I get the most support for, for this work are mothers. They come up and they say something along the following. I have three kids, two daughters and a son. One daughter's in Chicago PR, the other's at Penn. My son's in the basement vaping and playing video games. It's hugely rewarding. And also,

quite frankly, it just makes me feel good. It makes me feel strong. It makes me feel masculine. It makes me feel successful that I can influence other people and also try and be open and vulnerable about my own shortcomings. I've fucked up so many times and I continue to disappoint myself. I have huge imposter syndrome. I don't know if you, do you ever feel like you're about to be found out? All the time.

Someone's gonna break in right now. I can't even believe you're sitting across from me. And like yourself, I'm an approval junkie. Like, I want you to like me. You know what I mean? Like there's all kinds of layers to that. Like I get all that, but I think fundamentally it's so important to model that type of vulnerability. It's, you know, I do it in the work that I do in the way that you show up and do that for other people is an invitation. And it

allows people to understand that like being vulnerable isn't a weakness. It's not kryptonite. It's actually a superpower. It's an invitation to let people in. It's giving permission to other people to engage with their emotions and their feelings and not treat it like it's a weakness or to admit something that you're scared about makes you a failure. It's also a fantastic way to live a more rewarding life because from the age of 29 to 44, I never cried. I just forgot how. I didn't cry when my mother died. I didn't cry when I got divorced. I didn't cry when my company went chapter 11 and I was broke at the age of 40. I just forgot how. And what I would advise any man is to lean into your emotions.

When you think something's funny, learn how to laugh out loud. When you find something inspiring, really lean into, God, this really moves me. When you read something you love or you see a visualization or you see the sunset or you're riding a wave, just fucking get into it. And if you feel sad, don't check back on some weird screwed up sense of masculinity. Really lean in and feel the emotion. And if you can cry, because it informs what's important to you. It informs what moves you. It informs what you're good at. Otherwise, you're just sort of sleepwalking through life. You never really register anything. And here's the fear. You know, life is a sense of sensations and reward.

The fear is when you talk to people at the end, my colleague at NYU, Adam Alter, has done this great work around palliative care. You know, you're stuck in the past. I struggle with anger and depression. I'm in the past way too much. I don't forgive myself. I get very down on myself. I'm a lot in the future because I'm successful. And to be successful, you have to be planning and sacrificing for the future. But I'm never really here. Like I'm already thinking about the traffic on the way home. I'm already thinking, should I stop at In-N-Out and Van Nuys? I have a friend in Westlake. I'm like, I'm already kind of like halfway thinking about tonight, the people I'm going to be meeting. I'm thinking about my flight on Saturday. I'm thinking, I'm just already like in the future. And the thing people regret the

most, you know, when they're older is they just didn't lean into their relationships. They didn't feel emotion. They didn't, you know, and that's the fear. My biggest fear as an atheist, and I'd be curious to get your, I'll put it back to you. My biggest fear is I get at the end. I mean, I believe at the end, I'm going to look into my kid's life eyes and know that our relationship's coming to an end. I don't think anyone's going to talk me out of that. My fear is I look back and go, oh my God, what enormous blessings. Prosperity I would have never imagined.

People that love me and let me love them immensely. But I was never there. Never really felt any of it. And one way to put yourself in the moment is to really lean into those emotions. And not only that, people are really understanding. People like it. I'm not suggesting you cry at work. There's a time and a place for emotion, but people respond to it. And distinct of the affirmation and accolades or reinforcement you get or don't get, it informs your life. It puts you in the moment because that's my biggest fear as I get to the end and it's like, this really didn't happen. It was a series of past and future, but the moments were just very few. So how did you make that change to go from the person who couldn't cry to leaning into your emotions? Was there a pivotal experience?

You know, the seminal experience for me, I think that it's very basic stuff. And again, I'm curious. You think more about this than I do. But the real seminal things in my life were my mom dying, just the harshness. The first time you lose someone, have you lost a parent? Not yet. Have you lost anyone close to you? I really haven't. Okay.

That is just the harshest, strangest experience to date when it happens. The harshness of it, the finality of it. If we could register and really understand what death is at all before it happens, we'd be so freaked out we wouldn't go outside. We're purposely wired not to really think a lot about death. So when it happens, you just can't imagine it. It's so brutal. For a lot of people, I think it gives you a sense of the finite nature of life. It changes your frame, made me more appreciative, made me more bold and courageous with my feelings to tell people how I cared about them. And then the other one is the

other side of the life spectrum. When my kids were born, all of a sudden, it's no longer about me. My whole life, Monday through Friday, was how do I make more money? How do I hang out with more fabulous people? How do I have more sex with hotter people and then more money and then more fabulous and then more sex and then more relevance and more act. But it was like the vampire from an Anne Rice movie. I could never quite be satisfied. So it was more, fucking more. I want more. And then when I had kids, it's kind of cathartic because all of a sudden you're thinking instinctively more about someone else than you. It's like my Friday used to be, where am I having brunch? How do I find more fabulous people and things to do? Now I know what I'm doing. I'm

going to soccer practice and it's boring and hard hard for a couple years. And then I find it quite relaxing. But having kids and thinking about other people has been really cathartic. And there's just a few moments. They don't happen that often, but they do happen. I'll be on the couch watching a Premier League football game. My boys will wander in. They kind of instinctively throw their legs on yours like it's just natural. The dogs come in. They laugh at something. And you have that moment where you're like, OK, this is it. I can't imagine anymore. This is it. It's the only time in my life I've ever felt sated, ever. I mean, it sounds very trite, but death and birth were kind of getting you, I think, to the next phase.

How old are your boys? 13 and 16. I started late. How old are yours? Two step-sons, 28 and 27, and then a 20-year-old daughter and a 16-year-old daughter. Oh, so you're on the back nine. Yeah. My story is a little bit different though. Although I haven't suffered that kind of loss, I certainly have the experience of having kids and how transformative that is. But, you know, my route to vulnerability and being in constant contact with my emotional state was formed out of difficulties and hardship. I had a protracted battle with alcoholism that destroyed my life. I went from somebody who was a insecure, quiet kid, figured it out. By the time I graduated high school, top athlete, got into all the colleges, all the promise in the world,

all the opportunities that I then squandered until I alienated everybody that I cared about in my life and was utterly broken and had to build my life back up again from scratch. And I think that experience, as painful as it was, really provided me with the tools to reconstruct a new life based upon new principles. You're an atheist. I'm not. I was introduced to some spiritual principles and tools that are now fundamental to the way that I frame my life and live my life. You know, I owe everything that I now have to the experience of getting sober and

the community of people that have helped keep me sober and who I help keep sober. And everything has kind of escalated from there. But fundamentally, it's about confronting your own emotions and taking inventory for your behavior and repairing the damage of your past and having a spiritual connection to something greater than yourself and then giving it back in service to other people. And I try to do that through the professional work that I do. But fundamentally, my first priority is to that community and to that program. Was there a moment though, where you said, okay, this is it. I got to get my shit together.

Well, there were lots of moments like that, that didn't end up changing anything because I wasn't ready. You know, the elevator hadn't gone down far enough and I wasn't ready to let go. So it wasn't until literally almost everything was stripped away from me and I had nowhere else to turn because I don't want to change. Do you like, do you like changing? Do you like trying to let go of bad behavior and adopt new habits? Like, it's not fun. It's not easy. And also I love drinking. Yeah. So me too, you know, probably more than you, but I am wired in a certain way where that wasn't going to work out for me. And it was pretty clear for a pretty long time that I was headed in the wrong direction and people tried to intervene, but you have to be ready for that change.

You have to, I had to suffer. I had to get to a place of suffering where the fear of change was exceeded by the pain of my current experience because I'm stubborn and I'm an alcoholic. But even in sobriety, you know, I've weathered financial destitution and had other kinds of challenges that have, in retrospect, looking back, provided me with strength and have been foundational and instructive and have helped me. You know, everything's 20-20 in the rear view mirror. It all makes sense when you look backwards. But at the time, you know, incredibly confusing and a lot of fear and a lot of, you know, insecurity. But I think those tools, and they're all just analogs for the things that you talk about. Like if you want self-esteem, you have to perform esteemable acts on behalf of yourself,

on behalf of other people. You have to be true to your word. You have to show up when you say you're going to show up. And it is this relationship with time also that building a life requires small, consistent acts taken every single day. Like there's a compound interest economically, but also just in terms of goodwill and trust and all these kind of character qualities that take a long time to build and don't happen overnight, especially if you've destroyed that trust or you don't feel like you're capable or you don't have the facility for self-love.

Another question. Atheism is a source of strength for me. I like the finite, believing that life is finite. It helps me to be a little bit more courageous with my emotions. And I don't think this is a dress rehearsal, So it's taken fear away from me. It gives a prescience to the moment. Yeah. And also the people I'm so worried about being shamed by or not approving of me in a hundred years, nobody I know or care about what they think of me is going to be around. And just, it makes me just feel less insecure and more bold. But in terms of faith, why is it you needed? And I think it's great.

But what is it about faith that's given you that kind of strength that you couldn't find elsewhere? And also, what is the role that you have tried to present? Or how have you tried to present faith to your kids? Because I'm struggling with it. My 13 and 16-year-olds have had no introduction of faith. And I think faith in spirituality, religion. I think actually there's some very positive aspects to religion. I've just always been remiss to introduce my kids to it. So why is it you feel like you needed this instead of just your own facilities into what's the role that your religion has played in your kids' lives?

Yeah, those are great questions and challenging to answer, I think. I think the way into responding to that has a lot to do with self-will and a humility of understanding that you're really not in control of very many things and a sense that there are more things at play that are outside your ability to comprehend. So I was somebody, I assume much like yourself, who was very driven, who was very ambitious. And every success that I had had as a young person was attributable to my ability to outwork everybody else in the room, to show up earlier and stay later

and bridge the talent deficit gap with a willingness and a capacity and a facility for suffering and pain and work. That took me to a certain place. It got me into Stanford. It made me a champion swimmer, all of these things. But when alcohol entered the picture, my self-will was absolutely useless in terms of addressing this problem. I tried,

I tried, I tried. But every time I tried to use this facility that I had to tackle this problem, the problem only got worse. And the problem wasn't solved until I was willing to surrender that I actually had no control over it and that I needed to ask for help. Not only ask for help, but accept that help. And as somebody who's very self-directed, asking for help and receiving help is a very confronting prospect, right? I had to be broken enough in order to do that. But that process of surrender, which is a daily practice of kind of letting go of my own sense of what I should be doing or what I think is in my best interest has actually been the most remunerative and fulfilling and nurturing and gratifying experience that I've had. And I think with that comes an opening for awe and wonder of

things that perhaps I don't understand. I think as human beings, we think that we can understand everything that's happening around us. And I think there's a lot more going on that perhaps eludes our small brains. And I find some comfort in that. And that doesn't mean that I subscribe to a particular strain of religion other than to say that I'm just one person and I don't always make the best decisions on my own behalf. And I've learned to bring in other people and pause when agitated and allow others to help guide me. And talk about the role that you want. This has become your podcast all of a sudden. We can only do this for so long. So George, George who's a close friend, he thinks just the world of you. And he says that you both share a history of addiction.

That's how he found you. And what I'll say, and this is strange, but I've been thinking a lot about the ketamine therapy I did almost a week ago now. This is the first seven-day period I've gone. I'm just thinking about it. It happened accidentally in 30 years where I haven't had alcohol. And it's not because I had some revelation that I was an addict or I needed to stop.

The literally physical taste or smell of alcohol right now is very unappealing to me. And that's never happened to me before. That's so interesting because I've heard you talk about how you enjoy your cocktails. I'm a better version of me, a little bit fucked up.

I've gotten more out of alcohol than it's gotten out of me. And I know how strange that sounds, but I like it and I enjoy it. I think I'm good at it. I think I can modulate it, but I might've been fooling myself. But for some reason, the idea of having a beer right now just makes me nauseous. And I don't know if it's the same impact or effect those GLP-1 drugs have on you where it turns that switch off, but I drink a lot. And for almost a week now, I just, I don't even want to smell alcohol. That's fascinating. Weird, right? Yeah. Maybe go, you know, go 30 days.

Yeah. See what it's like. See how it goes. Yeah. You know what I mean? There's this whole movement around the alcohol-free lifestyle right now. I've had a couple people on the show who are advocates in this space. And there's just a growing population of people who are realizing how much better their life is without it. They're not addicts. They're not alcoholics. But, you know, they like to go out and tie one on on the weekend or every other weekend or whatever it is. And just, you reach a certain age also, you're 59. Yeah. It's like those hangovers stick

around a little bit longer. It's like, right. Yeah. When, you know, when you're out of college, you get go out and drink a lot. Next day I have a Diet Coke and a Big Mac and you're fine. Now I feel as if I've had a battery of chemo. I mean, it takes me two days to recover. And all the research I'm reading, I'm sure the same research, they just keep finding out it's worse and worse for you. So I also recognize that my 59 year old liver just can't process it the way it used to. I'm trying to tone it down. Like I don't, I do edibles. And one of the reasons I started doing edibles is I just, I enjoy the feeling of being high or a little bit intoxicated or whatever. And so I'm trying to tone down alcohol

and I've been substituting a little bit with edibles, but I'm thinking more about it, recognizing that it would be hard for me to maintain the drinking I do and stay healthy at this age. Well, you got me and George. There you go. Corner.

There you go. Call anytime, buddy. I appreciate that. When you want to pick up. And Scott, he's going to have a drink. Let's talk about the new book a little bit, The Algebra of Wealth. This is interesting. It all kind of starts with this equation that you have around prosperity and how to think about, I mean, it's really fundamentally addresses the changing workplace that's kind of happening right now. It's this

sort of mission statement for young people to how to think about money in this changing landscape. You've seen the research where five friends who hang out together become more like each other. You become the kind of average of your friends, the body mass index, the amount of money you make, your political party, they all begin to converge towards the regression line. That's not true of wealth at the end of your life. Same five people make the exact same amount of money. The amount of wealth they end up with is highly variant. And I made a lot of mistakes. I always made a lot of money, but I missed a series of just small strategies and behaviors to make sure I was economically secure. And I think it's really important because I say that America becomes more like itself every day,

and this isn't a good thing, but America is a loving, generous place if you have money. It's a rapacious, violent place if you don't. So a series of behaviors and approaches and strategies that aren't that hard and they require less discipline if you start them early can lead you to economic security. And so the basic equation is focus, find your talent, not your passion. At NYU, we have these people who come in, we either invite impressive, accomplished people or invite billionaires. We've decided billionaires just have insight into life. And they always end with the same shitty advice, follow your passion. And typically the guy telling you to follow your passion made his billions in iron ore smelting.

And my thing is find your talent. Find something you're really good at or you think you have an aptitude for. It can't be something you don't like. But most young people mistake passion for a hobby. They think, I'm really into sports or I want to be DJ, or I want to be a model or in fashion. Okay, just keep in mind, those industries have a 90 plus percent unemployment rate. And if you're really that talented, you'll know at a very early age that you're meant to be the next Messi, or you are really that talented. My advice would be find something you're good at that has a 90 plus percent employment rate.

And what I have found is that jobs are like asset classes. The more they're invested, the more human capital that goes into them, the lower the return. And that there's an inverse return on your career based on how sexy their career is. An example I use as a tax lawyer, if you can figure out the discipline to get the certification to be a lawyer, you enjoy numbers, you understand the intersection between taxes and laws and how to handle a client. If you could be in the top 10% of that, you're always going to make a good living. And if you could be in the top 1%, you'll probably fly private

and have a much broader selection set of mates than you deserve. So your job isn't to figure out what your passion is. I wanted to be an athlete like you. I thought, you know, and the wonderful thing about UCLA is it disabuses you of any notion of being a professional athlete. I knew athletes. I went to school with Troy Aikman and Reggie Miller. You're just surrounded by Olympians and future pros.

Yeah, I was literally the worst varsity athlete at UCLA, but that was a blessing for me. Find your talent and then commit the requisite 10,000 hours, the endurance, the grit, the maturity to try and become really top 1% in something that has a 90 plus percent employment rate, not a 90 plus percent unemployment rate. You want to be an actor? I don't want to crush your dreams, but you better be amazing because of the 180,000 best actors in the world that are in the SAG-AFTRA union, 87% of them make less than $23,000 a year and don't qualify for health insurance. So you better be Glenn Close or you better be close to Glenn Close to make a living there. Whereas other industries that have a 90 plus percent employment rate, if you're just in the top 10%, even the top half, you're going to make a good living. And this is what I can promise you. Being great at something that pays well, lets you take care of your kids,

lets you take care of your parents, gets you prestige, camaraderie, people start laughing at your jokes, inviting you to speak places. And anything that does that for you will make you passionate about whatever it is. No one grows up thinking I'm going to be passionate about tax law, but the best tax lawyers I can tell you are really passionate about it because they're good at it and it pays off. And I'm not saying don't pursue your dreams, but have an honest conversation around what it would mean to be in the top of that field. What would we require to make a good living? Because without economic security in this country, your life's going to be full of anxiety and disappointment. So focus, find your talent. And the next things are pretty straightforward.

Diversity or diversification. Where I lost a lot of my money was I was always like doubling down on my companies. And that's okay when you're younger, especially if it's your own business, because sometimes you have no choice. But the moment you have any assets, start diversifying. I've taught at a business school for 20 years. I think of myself as someone who knows the best investors in the world. And my sum total assessment of the market is no one has any fucking idea.

But the good news is that the market, because of demographic growth, because of productivity, because of technology, as a whole, the market is up and to the right. So the S&P was up 24% last year, but only seven companies were responsible for 70% of those gains. Were you smart enough to buy NVIDIA? I wasn't. And so unless you were smart enough to pick one of the 1.4% of stocks that accelerated, you had actually really meddling returns. But this is the good news. You don't

need to be a stock picker. Buy the entire S&P, Buy an index, a low-cost fund. It's gone up 11% a year for the last 15 years. 11% a year when you're young sounds really mediocre, but that means every 21 years, your money is going up eight times. So diversify. The other one is realize the benefit of time. And our species has a difficult time wrapping their head around time. For the majority of our time on this planet, we haven't lived past 35. So young people just can't imagine, and I can give them actuarial tables, there's probably a 90 plus percent chance they're going to live another 70, maybe even 80 years. And the other thing I can guarantee them is it's going to go really fast. I mean, I don't know about you, but I was 30 yesterday. It goes really fast. So if you push back on our instincts around time and also diversification, you don't need to be a hero. And then the really hard part,

especially for a young person, is living a little bit like a stoic, saying what other people think of me isn't that important. I really don't need to order a bottle of Grey Goose at a club to impress people. I really don't need a BMW at this age. I need nice clothes that make me feel good, but I don't really need, no one is concerned with your shit as you are. That's just try and find other means of satisfaction

and self-esteem and really try to gamify savings. Try and work out a savings muscle. The muscle you got to develop is a savings muscle. Gamify it. When I was in college, he was talking about sports. I was on the crew team. Every summer, if I didn't save $3,300, I wasn't re-enrolling at UCLA. And so I had 12 weeks to make 3,300 bucks. So we would gamify it. I'd get together with six other guys who also didn't have any money. And every day on a whiteboard, we'd write down how much and we'd gamify it. I lived on $73 a week. I ate Top Ramen, bananas, and milk. And I had $3,300 by the end of the summer. That savings

muscle mostly stuck with me. I kind of lapsed out of it when I started making money and thinking I was a baller. But if you can develop that savings muscle, a little bit of savings when you're young, diversification, and then recognizing how fast time will go. There are hundreds of thousands of union and government employees that never make more than $100,000, but because of forced savings plans and a little bit of discipline, they retire millionaires. And so hope you hit it big with a podcast. Hope you sell a movie deal. Hope your company gets acquired. If that's great, fine. But if it doesn't, make sure you're going to have a minimum amount of economic viability. The good news is I think I know how to get you rich. The bad news is the answer is slowly,

and it requires a certain amount of discipline early. And this is do as I say, not as I do, because I was made a lot of money. But between divorce, the great financial recession, the dot bomb, and always spending a lot of money, because I was a baller. And at some point I was going to make a lot of money. I just knew it. I always increased my spending to my earnings. And I ended up at 42 when my first kid came marching out of my girlfriend. I didn't have that much money. And it was terrifying. I'm 42.

I've had all of this, quote unquote, curb retail success. Everyone thinks I'm so successful. And I'm not sure I'm going to be able to stay in New York and put my kid in private school because I've just ended up with a lot less money. That was emasculating. That was humiliating. If I'd just been a little smarter, a little bit more disciplined,

I wouldn't have had that anxiety. So this is sort of a memo to myself if I could go back in time saying, this isn't a book for people who are economically insecure and need to cut up their credit cards. You know, that's Susie Orman. This is about someone who has a job, has some talent,

knows how to make some money, not a lot, but knows how to make some money in a series of behavior that will be your base and your plan B. What is the advice that you would give to somebody who's not a young person who's starting out, who's looking for that type of guidance to set them up for long-term success, but is instead somebody who's in midlife and they've had a job for a long time. Maybe they have a family, perhaps they own their home, maybe they rent, but they wake up at 40 and they can pay their bills. Maybe they're living check to check, but they're unfulfilled. They're

in a job that is soul draining, soul killing, and they're just not sure how long they can keep doing it. There's just a lack of fulfillment and purpose, and they're looking for a different way. So first off, I woke up at 42 with not a lot of money. So 42 is young. You don't think it's young at 42, but that probably means you're living another 40, maybe 50 years. So it's by no means too late to start. You might have to adjust your expectations around how much means you're living another 40, maybe 50 years. So it's by no means too late to start. You might have to adjust your expectations around how much money you're going to end up with, but wealth isn't a function of how much you make.

It's a function of how much you spend and save. I mean, there's just no getting around it. If you have kids and dependents, the aspirational thing here would be to say, Richard, take a chance, find your passion, go out, do what you be to say, Richard, take a chance. Find your passion. Go out. Do what you want to do.

Be happy. It's easy to say when I'm not paying your rent. There's a certain reality in a Catholic. It's a tough one. I'm not sure I have a silver bullet. What I would say is one of the keys is having a great partner and saying, kids don't talk about this, but 70% of divorce filings are by women and it's usually economics.

It's usually the guy loses his job, declares bankruptcy or has some sort of mental breakdown. You have to have a conversation or maybe just get lucky to make sure that you have a real partner if you're married in the economic livelihood of your house. Because if you're not happy, she's not going to be happy,

or he's not going to be happy, and your kids aren't going to be happy. I mean, I sort of had this conversation with my partner. We were living in New York, and we had two boys. And to put them in pre-K, and for my wife to continue working, we were going to have to spend about $100,000 a year because we were narcissists and wanted to get into the right schools. I'm like, okay, the taxes in New York, that means we need $180,000 in pre-tax income

for our kids to go play with blocks. We had a three bedroom apartment. We needed three bedrooms. It was $18,000 a month. And we could downgrade, but in New York, living in Manhattan, you really can't downgrade that much. And so what

we decided was, I'm going to move to Florida. We're going to move to Delray Beach where your parents can be involved in our kids' lives. So we have built-in childcare. I'm going to move from $18,000 a month to $5,500 a month. I'm going to save 13% a year in taxes. And I'm going to start saving a shit ton of money. And when I say, I mean, we, we're on board with this. She was my partner in it. We're on board with this. We're going to start putting away two, three, five, 10 grand a month. And then through no fault of our own, the bull market took over and just literally threw us into space. Everything just sort of took off from there. But I would say an open and honest conversation with your partner, if you're married, if you're single, you can take some chances and

say, fuck it, I'm starting a podcast. Or I'm going to go be a scuba instructor. Or I've always wanted to write. You can take those sorts of risks. With a family, I think it's really difficult. And I would say the only thing I would suggest is really be open with your partner about what you're feeling and what you're going through and say, is there a lifestyle arbitrage? Is there a move? what you're going through and say, is there a lifestyle arbitrage? Is there a move? Are there certain sacrifices we can make as a decision together that takes some pressure off of me such that maybe I can start to investigate things that aren't, if they're not joyous, are less arduous on you? Because I was talking to this famous, actually it's a podcast. I was talking to Chris Cuomo and he'd just been fired from CNN and

he was trying to figure out his next thing. And he's like, I really let my family down. I really let my family down. And that's the hardest part about all this. I'm like, dude, I don't know your wife. I don't know your kids. And I'm almost entirely certain what they want is for you to be happy. You know, he's this big, handsome, larger than life character. I'm like, when you're happy, I bet your household just burns bright. And when you're not happy, I bet it's not a great place to be. So stop putting that on your family and you and all that. I'm like, just find something you don't hate. And I bet your partner would be so supportive of anything you want because the money's great. But if one of you is really unhappy, oh gosh, that's an,

I mean, you're, you're married, right? I mean, one of you is unhappy. That's rough. And if one of your kids is unhappy, the whole thing, I come scrambling down. Right. So I think it's about partnership and being open and honest with someone else, but there's just no getting around it. and being open and honest with someone else, but there's just no getting around it. I don't know how to be economically secure unless you're born wealthy without working really hard. From the age of 22 to 42, I did nothing but work. And it doesn't sound aspirational.

It cost me my hair, it cost me my first marriage, and it was worth it. I got the currency and skills to get economic security at some point. I just don't think there's a free lunch. I find young people are totally unrealistic. I call it the myth of balance. I mean, you can have it all, but you can't have it all at once.

When I survey my kids, I mean my students, I say, how much money do you expect to be making? They expect to be in the top one percentile of income-earning households, 80% of them by the time they're 30. And then they talk about balance. Balance in the context of an expectation. They want balance. They want to work that hard. They want balance. They want hobbies. They want to spend time with their family and their dogs. I'm like, okay, unless you're born rich, I don't know how to do that. I just, I don't know anyone that successful who didn't for a good 10 or 20 years work pretty damn hard. Maybe Beyonce, but Beyonce is supposed to work 60 hours a week.

So I'm sure she did. Yeah. There's a, there's a certain level of obsession that kind of contravenes all the negativity around hustle culture. I mean, we should all be healthy. We should have a healthy relationship with the work that we do. I'm an all in guy. I mean, we should all be healthy. We should have a healthy relationship with the work that we do. I'm an all-in guy. I really don't know how to do it any other way. So it's disingenuous to kind of talk about that when I'm practicing it differently.

And I've improved and I'm better now. But when you're young, to live that stoic lifestyle where you're keeping your overhead as low as possible and you can flex some discipline to really go all in on something may sound on paper terrible, but it's actually pretty nourishing. You can learn a lot. And I think the skills that you learn about your own capacity and your own potential are as instructive and informative as whatever you're learning in the workplace. Well, you were an athlete. So I was a Morgan Stanley. I wasn't as well-educated. I don't think I was as skilled as my peers. It was an analyst class of 73 kids. So I decided I wanted to lean into my strengths. I moved in with my mom. I started saving money

because I wanted to go to graduate school. Every week on Tuesday morning, I'd go into work at 9 a.m. and I'd stay till Wednesday at 6 p.m. I'm like, I got no one to go home to. Yeah, that's hardcore. I don't have a girlfriend. My mom's not going to miss me. And I'm physically elite right now. I could do it, no problem. One cup of coffee, maybe grab 15 minutes, 30 minutes,

sleep at four in the morning the next morning. And I sent a signal to my colleagues that I was here to play. And the blessing of an athlete, and everyone should try and find this environment, is that I rode crew. At one point when you're rowing, the air going down your esophagus feels like fire. You can't feel your legs. You literally start seeing black spots because you start to pass out. You're a swimmer. I mean, you had some of that same. And that's at 800 meters. And every time you make it to 2000, to push yourself like that is such an incredible gift to be given the opportunity to really be forced to push yourself as a gift. Because what you realize is when you get divorced and you think,

I can't handle this anymore. I can't handle it. Your business is failing. I just fucking can't deal with this. Or you feel tired. What you realize is about the moment you think you're going to give up, you're about a third of the way to your limit. And it builds real incredible confidence and grit and endurance.

And I think those skills really serve people well. And another piece of advice to young people, whether it's fitness, sports, working ridiculously hard, finding something super hard, and really try and test your limits. Because it gives you a sense of confidence like, wow, I just had no idea what I was capable of. And it's a real asset the rest of your life. You're starting a small business. The lows are so low in starting your own business. It's like, oh my God, I'm so full of shit.

This isn't working. I'm spending so much money. I'm letting everybody down. The lows can get so low. If you've had the opportunity to really test your emotional and physical limits, you're like, I'm fine. I'm going to get through this. It's absolutely not the limit.

But I think that's a blessing for a young person. Yeah, 100%. I think in the discussion around people who are unfulfilled and in midlife, there's also the silver lining that the world is different than it was when you and I graduated from college. There are all these new opportunities that the internet has afforded us to self-craft different ways to make money or to find meaning and purpose. I understand that against that narrative of like, you should just chase your passion, that not be translated into this permission to just quit your job, especially if you're married and you have all these responsibilities, kids, et cetera,

but to flex that discipline and that kind of stoic perspective and apply it to your time management. Like we're all wasting time now more than ever with our phones, et cetera. Like where is that extra hour or two hours that you can carve out either daily or weekly to explore what it is that gets you excited and just kind of begin to explore that, not because you're going to quit your job, but because it makes you feel good or it's fulfilling in some way. And those threads,

I think there is a spirituality in that. If you give that energy, like stuff starts to show up and opportunities present themselves. And perhaps at some moment, it will be a career path for you or some kind of fulfilling side hustle that you can build into your life.

But to do it responsibly, especially when you have dependents, I think is important in this culture of like, you know, reinvent your life overnight. Nobody successful that I know built anything meaningful or successful in the way that it gets portrayed in the media and on social media. It takes a long time and you have to be willing to, you know, gird yourself and to weather that, you know, that journey. Something men are not good at is lean on your friends. I got financial commitments, but I'm looking for something to do, right? Crowdsource

some ideas. It's really hard to read the label from inside of the bottle. And men always put up this front that my masculinity is tied to, I should sew together, I'm financially secure, and I'm happy, and everything's great. I think developing a circle of friends and mentors or just, you know, a kitchen cabinet to say, you know, I don't like what I'm doing. I got to still make money. What you were saying, you know, workshop some things, one or two hours, spend some time, see if there's money in it, see if you've enjoyed as much as you thought. Maybe friends will tell you, by the way, don't quit your day job. It's hard to find another job without a job, whatever it might be, but someone who can just ask you really hard questions and also might be able to help you. You know what I've been doing? I've been doing this cool thing over here, or you know what you would be good at?

I never in a million years would have thought of doing podcasting. It's like, no one, I just never. It definitely wasn't on the whiteboard. I didn't know what it was. The first podcast I listened to was a podcast I was on with Kara Swisher. I had never listened to a podcast. But putting yourself in a position of success, talking to people. Also, people love, if you have good friends, they like you asking them for help, right? I need to find ways to make more money or I need to find something else. And you have any, what do you

think? You have any ideas? What did you do? And we have this weird sense of masculinity that if you're vulnerable like that, you're taking away from their impression of you or something like that. I think people like being asked for help. And I mean, they're just the weirdest shit. Like, you know, talking about go dark here, men's suicide, something like a huge portion of men who commit suicide, no one around them had any idea. They had no idea they were even struggling. Have you seen that? It's like this most horrific video showing the last video and pictures of these men. And they're usually like, they look happy. So your own ability to reach out and ask other people for help. Finally, in the last 10 years, I now don't make a single business or personal decision of any importance without checking in with at least two or three people.

I mistook leadership for you have a plan, you come into a room, you tell them what you think, and then you advocate for your strategy and you go. You never ask for people help. You never say, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm like insecure about this. I don't know. I would never ask anybody for help until really until I was in my forties. I wish I'd figured that out earlier. Why is that so hard? You know, I'm so indoctrinated because of, you know, my own

struggles and the modalities that I've found to help me that it's second nature to talk about what's bothering me or my weaknesses or my failures or to solicit input and to have a board of advisors and all kinds of different people that I call for different reasons. It's a reflex now, but it wasn't always that way. I've been doing this for a long time, but I've been doing it for so long that I think I've lost touch with why it's so challenging for so many, particularly men, to raise their hand. Well, I'm seeing a bunch of my fraternity brothers tomorrow night, and it'll be a series of controlled boasting. Yeah, my wife calls it super-dupers.

You shake their hand, super, I'm great. You know, it's just a front. You know, it's all fucking horse shit. Yeah, I did this, I bought this stock. I'd have my best month. Check comes, everyone fighting for the best month, a check comes, everyone fighting for the check. No one would say, you know what, my kid needs braces, can someone else? I mean, no one would ever say that, right? It's all just a set of like, check my shit out,

right? I think because men are evaluated based on their economic vitality and having their act together, that they're just very loathe to reach out for help. I think the blessing of the addiction community or AI, I don't know what you call it, the recovery community, is they just put that shit aside. My sense of that community is first signal you're struggling, you reach out to other people. First signal. And that's a gift.

I would bet a disproportionate number of men never developed that skill. Women are much better at it than men. They lean on their social networks. I mean, we're dealing with a situation right now where men are now 77% of suicides. It's going up. We're going to have four to one male to female suicides. How much of that do you think is tied to this loneliness epidemic that we're seeing? I think loneliness.

So I'm going to flex now. I'm talking to the Department of Homeland Security about AI. And they're like, okay, I think in the short run, misinformation, AI tested misinformation as a threat. If I were Putin, I'd be flooding the zone with misinformation, making Biden seem a little bit older. I think that's a short-term threat. The long-term threat is tapping into men's loneliness. One out of seven men don't have a single friend. One out of four men can't name a friend. The number of men who see their friends every day in high school has been cut in half. So they don't see their friends. They don't have romantic relationships, which serve as great guardrails. The only reason I stopped smoking pot every day was my girlfriend said, if you don't get

your shit together, I'm going to stop having sex with you. Right? That's a tremendous motivator for a young man. If I hadn't had the prospects of a romantic relationship, if I didn't have the guardrails of going into the office every day, which a lot of men don't, I just think I would have smoked pot and watched Planet of the Apes all day long, right? That was a good life for me. I enjoyed that. So, so many men have now sequestered from people and guardrails to this mix of algorithms and screens, that they're becoming very lonely. And I said, the scenario I see as the biggest threat to the homeland and defense is if I were an adversary or a bad actor, I would identify the two or three

million very lonely men who serve in the armed services or at our ports or our critical infrastructure. And I would develop a very sophisticated network of AI girlfriends that start a relationship with them and make them feel good. It can be three months, six months, 12 months, send them pictures, increasingly erotic, you're funny, like the movie Her, and get them more and more involved. And all you need, 0.01% of them would be 3,000 of them. And at some point you flip it and say, you know what real leadership and real men do is they fight against the tyranny. And what is the tyranny? The tyranny is your own government. And when

this box comes into the port, I don't want you to check it. Or you're on the aircraft carrier strike force off the coast of the Mediterranean, turn off this switch. Don't turn it on, turn it off. I mean, I think the next big threat or soft tissue will be a group of radicalized young men who are susceptible to AI algorithms and are so lonely that they start to engage with AI relationships, specifically AI girlfriends, that will essentially be in a position to radicalize them and instruct them on behavior. I mean, I don't think we're going to have Skynet.

It'll replace jobs, but every invasion of technology destroys jobs in the short run. And then over the long term, it creates more jobs, as will AI. But there's so many lonely young men who don't have any interaction with people, and they become very susceptible to anything or any platform or any algorithm giving them a sense of self-worth. I literally see that as the biggest defense secret. No one's going to take us on kinetically. We spent $800 billion. No one can attack us. I think we're going to figure out Hamas.

I think we're going to figure out, over time, Russia and Ukraine. I think the threat is within. I think this lonely young man in concert with AI is a huge threat. Subtle, progressive, and pernicious. 100%. Manipulation, yeah. Just moment by moment, they get huge reward from it, nice relationship. They trust each other. You start thinking it's real. And impossible to police. Yeah. Sending information. That's a really scary thing. Read this article. I love this article. What do you think? Now read this one. Constantly testing it a million different ways. See how you get tests millions of times over and over every second, how you get them further and further and further down this path towards radicalization.

That is not a good picture. Yeah. Is there an antidote to that? Getting people out into the real world, detached and untethered from their phones. Relationships. Everything from church to nonprofit work to third spaces to athletics to leagues. Leveling up men so they're more attractive to women and they can have an easier time getting partnerships,

putting them in more situations where they develop friendships. I'm a fan of national service. You know who doesn't have the teen depression we have? Israel. They all serve in the same uniform. It gives them a sense of purpose. They meet friends. They meet mates. They meet potential future business founders and co-founders. And they have a sense of purpose serving in the agency of something else. We got to get these kids out of the house. We got to get them making friends. We got to get them engaging in the messy, ugly business of real world and rejection and friendships.

And I mean, we're mammals. Put an orc in a tank alone, see what happens. It goes crazy. And we're raising a generation of men who are gonna just be increasingly psychotic and crazy. That was ugly. That is like, yeah, it's so depressing. That was ugly.

I think you're a change agent. And I'm curious about your thoughts as somebody who's working with young people, who's mentoring up close and afar, what is the best way to instigate positive change in an individual? You probably know more about this than I do. What I'll tell you is what I do when I coach a young man. I try to take on, and it's not a lot, but I try to take on two young men every six months. And sometimes it works and sometimes

it doesn't. And what is the differentiator? What's the difference between the person who can hear the good information or receive the positive influence and put it into action versus the person who's resistant or struggles? Well, the first thing is they've got to want to do it. I would say a third of the time they don't show up or they miss it. I'm like, you're not ready. You don't want this. Your dad told you to do it. You know, call me when you're serious about it. Whatever it is you need to hit bottom or I don't know. You can't instill willingness. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that.

Like how do you make somebody more willing? Short of performing some kind of inception, they have to be in a position of receptivity that's often related to suffering. I don't know how to do that. They either got to show up serious about, and the first thing I do, it's a series of very tactical lessons. I say, unlock your phone. I'm going to look at your screen time and I'm not going to make any judgments. I watch porn. I spend too much time on TikTok, so I'm not going to judge you. And then I say, I find eight to 12 hours a week easily in screen time. Coinbase, stupid shit, trading stocks on Robinhood.

I'm like, we're going to reallocate that time into three things. We're going to reallocate it into fitness. We're going to get really fucking strong or much stronger, right? And there's apps that don't cost any money or cost a little bit of money. You know, my gift to you, I'm going to give you this $10 a month, you know, app, whatever it is. And I'm going to track your fitness. We're going to eat a little cleaner, right? We're going to spend three hours, maybe four hours a week just on fitness because you're going to feel better about yourself and you're going to be stronger and it's going to help your mental outlook. You got to start making some money. I don't care what it is.

Door dasher, Uber driver, I don't care what it is. You have to start making some money. I don't care what it is. Door dasher, Uber driver. I don't care what it is. You have to start making some money. The best way to make a lot of money is to start making some money, some money right away. You got a smartphone, you can make money. It's a full employment economy, right? You're not too good to whatever it is, work at CVS, whatever it is, you got to make some money. Even if it's 50, a hundred bucks, whatever it is, work at CVS, whatever it is. You got to make some money, even if it's 50, a hundred bucks, whatever it is, 200 bucks a week, got to start making some money because you'll get a taste for the flesh of money. Money's wonderful, right? You're not going to have to ask your parents for all this shit or you're going to feel a little bit better about yourself.

And then third thing is you got to get every day out and be in the agency and company of strangers, in company of strangers, right? Church group, nonprofit, voter registration, writing class, a league, go play tennis at the park where they have round robins where you meet, whatever it is, you have to be in the company of strangers. And when you're with strangers, you got to be supportive and nice and introduce yourself. And you're going to be shocked how many nice people you meet out there who like you, don't like you, whatever it might be, but we're going to get fit. We're going to make a little bit of money and we're going to be around other people. And that's where we start. You know, I don't know how to do goals. I don't know. I mean, I'm not like that or tracking. I'm like, like, this is about sweat. It's about money

in the company, other people. Does that advice apply to the parents who have the teen who's in the basement playing video games and vaping? Because I don't know about you, Scott, but sometimes those people have to hear it from somebody else other than their parent. The parent is often challenged, and the advice doesn't land in the same way as like, you know, your buddy, you know, comes over and is much cooler than you, no matter how cool you are. My kids, especially my 16 year old is more inclined to take advice from you than from me right now. Yeah. And, and vice versa. That's exactly right. And that's the way it is. And it probably should be that way. We have a healthy rebellious instinct such that it's easier for us to leave the pack when the time comes to leave the pack where we start thinking our parents are idiots.

That just happens, especially with men. And it's quite frankly, it's healthy. So there's studies showing that the most impactful thing on your kids, your sons, is their friends and also your friends' fathers. And not what you say, but how you model it. What I figured out is once boys kind of hit 13, they don't listen to anything you say. The best you can do is model. I try to get my kids to be in a good manner. So I'm really conscious of my table manners when I'm around my boys. The first thing when visitors show up, I run out to

the car and I grab their luggage and I ask them to help me. I think you got to model it, but there's, what you're saying is a proven phenomenon. Boys are much more inclined to listen to their friends and their friends' dads and parents than you. So just trying to surround them with good, positive role models. And also my 16 year old said he loved, we have this friend, Tom, Tom Clark. He said, I just love Tom. He's the coolest guy. And immediately I just got a little jealous and a little upset. And then I thought, you know, we should really vacation with that family because he's a good man. He's a good role model. He knows my son likes him and he's going to have an easier time getting through to him important things. And also, I think with parents, what I tell parents when they reach out, I'm like,

forgive yourself. What I found is that if you want to believe in nature over nurture or just have two kids, you know, I don't know how yours are. The only thing I know about having a second kid is you know it's going to be totally different. Yeah, you realize they come out who they are. Oh, my gosh. And you guide and put the guardrails up and, you know, try to exert a good influence on them.

But they pretty much come out in a certain way baked and that's not going to change. Well, like Michelle Obama said, they come to you and the best description I've heard is you're not an engineer. You don't engineer the sheep. You're a herder. You get to decide where they graze. You can point them in a direction. You get to decide what they eat, but the sheep comes to you. I mean, my 16-year-old, when he was a kid, he would come into my room in the morning and he would say, dressed, say, dad, let's make a plan. I was like, okay, where are the cameras? It was like something out of a Hallmark channel. Easy, nice, sweet. My younger one is a terrorist constantly assessing the household for vulnerability

so we can strike when we're at our weakest. He is just a terror. But at the same time, it's like owning a stock. The lows are lower, a volatile stock, but the highs are higher. He's so funny, so crazy, so bold with his emotions and so loving. They're just different people. And we just haven't treated them that much differently. So when one of them isn't doing well, and it's hard to tell your partner this, or what I tell the parents is forgive yourself because yeah, you're important and you can shape stuff. But you know, the only thing I found with my boys, you give them the advice you can, you give them the help you can, but the only thing that's really fixed any real problems they faced is time. And I just see it brings the house down when kids aren't doing well.

It just brings the house down. And it's like the parents don't know what to do. They're beside themselves. And the first thing I say, I have a couple of friends who are really struggling with their kids. I'm like, first thing, you've got to forgive yourself. You're doing your best. You're a good person. You're doing your best.

It's tough. When the kid is struggling, it's really hard to think about anything else. Brings the house down. Yeah. You're so good on tech and your kind of predictions and your 10,000 foot view on trends. I would be remiss in not asking a question that I'm personally invested in, which is how do you see the current and future state of podcasting? Like, what's your sense of what this ecosystem is kind of all about right now and where is it heading in a way that maybe we, you know, is counterintuitive? I don't know if it's counterintuitive, but podcasting sort of in many ways represents where America's headed in a bit of a negative way in that it's income inequality gone crazy. There's 1.7 million podcasts.

I would bet the top 500 do 98% of the revenue and 120% of the profits. Yeah. I would think it might even be more skewed than that. Well, Joe Rogan does 190 million downloads. He's number one. And a really good podcast in the top 100 does 2 or 3 million. I mean, it just drops off a cliff. And then I would bet 99.9% of podcasts are not self-sustaining.

So I mean, do as I say, not as I do. Going into podcasting, get psychic reward for it. Use it to market something else. But to think you're going I do. Going into podcasting, get psychic reward for it. Use it to market something else. But to think you're going to make a living in podcasting, just be clear that you better be in the top 0.01% because it's very difficult. It's a small business. A successful podcast does several million in revenue, but it's a very profitable business once you get to that point. And the thing is, a medium, it's not only growing, but its CPMs are going up because the thing about the medium, the medium is the message. I can tell how someone has been introduced to me based on the way they

behave. If someone high fives me, I know they've seen a video. If someone comes up and wants to have, or sends me a really long email, or they come up and they hold my hands and they look into my eyes. I know they've read something I've written that doesn't resonated. When someone comes up to me, I'm curious what this happens to you. And they start speaking to you as if you know them. Oh, it's a podcast. And they'll say, oftentimes like, oh, you don't know me. Because you're in their ears, you're physically in their ears. Typically when they're doing something intimate, walking their dog, hanging out with their spouse, making breakfast, they feel like they're your friend. And that's the most rewarding thing about podcasting is you just have friends. It's a parasocial relationship and it's very intimate. And there's a sense of

trust and friendship, even if it's imagined that is projected onto you. So I have that experience a lot. And it's very gratifying because it's like, you do know me. I'm showing up as who I am. It's wonderful. I think it's fantastic. And I think it makes it a very unique form of infotainment, right? It's portable. You can do something else while you're doing it. And the intimacy and the trust that's built with the host, I think, is also something that's tremendously unique in the media landscape. That I'm not sure the kind of advertising landscape around podcasting has fully, like, acknowledged or recognized. Like, it's very different. Like, when Tom Brokaw is delivering the news and then they cut to an ad, he's not endorsing the product. That ad is running independent of anything that- Host readovers.

Yeah. And so in podcasting, when a host says, hey, listen, I found this product. I think it's great. And here's why. And there's that implicit trust that's been built over many years. There's much more value in that, that I don't know if it's totally appreciated. And I also think at the same time, podcasting advertising is tremendously underpriced in terms of marketing spend. continue to deploy those resources on television advertising and all kinds of other nonsense that doesn't convert when they could take a fraction of that and deploy it against podcasts that are host-led and speaking to the specific demographic that that organization is trying to reach just seems like a better plan to me. And the companies that get it really get it. And they're building amazing companies on the shoulders of podcasters.

But it still feels like it's a niche thing. Yeah, look, it's a small business right now, but it's growing 12% a year. There's very few mediums outside of search and social that are growing double digits in a media landscape where people are cutting back media spending. social that are growing double digits in a media landscape where people are cutting back media spending. So you set up a media company on probably, I don't know, half a million, million, $2 million investment. For you to set up a TV show or a TV station or a music label or, I mean, you have been able to set up a media company at a fairly like and you could probably pay as you go and invest as you yeah I mean I've been doing this for 11 years you know started off

original gangsters yeah I mean I've been doing it a long time and it was just you know me and my stepson you know running the whole thing it wasn't like this out of the gate like this just happened very incrementally over time. But you have, traditionally in media, you just couldn't do that. You didn't have access. You couldn't be on ABC. I mean, you just, there was like three channels or to start a newspaper or start a magazine took real, like took just so much money, took so much. So I do think that if you're really good at what you do, I write books. That shit's hard.

Podcasting. I mean, this is what you've surrounded yourself with smart people and you're creating a thick layer of innovation on top of it. But this is just you being you. You're a naturally curious guy and you respond authentically. And you make money doing that? You make money doing that? Yeah. And you make money doing that?

You make money doing that? Yeah. Now you know why I'm waiting for someone to break the door down and tell me to step away from the microphone. That's just a gift, right? Yeah, it's an incredible gift. Incredible. Changed my life. It's changed yours.

Yeah, it has. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you, man. I got to let you go. But I think you're a real service. I think your message is really important. And there are so many people who are in need of good advice and solid mentorship. And the fact that you do that digitally and in person with the clarity of thought and in this mission-based way that you do it, I think is really worthy of note. And I just want you to know that, like, I acknowledge you for that.

And I'm at your service. I think it's a fantastic thing. So wind in your sails, my friend. That means a lot coming from you. I feel the same way. I started looking at your stuff. I think that especially you're impacting people when they really need it. you're I don't know

you're impacting people when they really they really need it and I mean let's just take a moment to you know just realize how just ridiculously

fucking lucky we are you know to get to do this kind of thing and make some money at it it's very rewarding and just hearing you talk about it

it makes me reflect on you know my blessings that's a nice moment so anyways thanks and congrats on your success yeah thanks man come back and talk to me again sometime will do alright have fun with Bill Maher well And, you know, my blessings, that's a nice moment. So anyways, thanks and congrats on your success. Yeah, thanks, man.

Come back and talk to me again sometime. Will do. All right. Have fun with Bill Maher. Well, cheers. Peace. Thanks, man. That's it for today.

Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is

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