#127 Scott Galloway: The ONLY Savings Strategy You Need

23:36Scott Galloway:83 % of them last year didn't qualify for health insurance because they didn't make$23 ,000. So acting might be your passion, but unless you're in the top 1 % and you're getting bright blinking green signals that you're in the top 1%, go find something else. And I don't want to crush your dreams, just have a sober conversation around what's required to make a living in that industry. So find something you're good at. And the key part of that is find something you're good at in a non-romantic industry. The guy who has this studio, I've been here twice this week, this isn't that romantic. He found some shitty loft space on Avenue B and rents it out to podcasters and is probably making really good money.

24:14Scott Galloway:He didn't dream of that when he was nine. I know I'm going to install sound insulation on a loft in a mediocre area in Manhattan and rent it out to podcasters. I don't think he was dreaming that when he was nine. But this is a good business. Now I just opened two more. There you go. This is a find something you're good at and think I could become great. And by the way, if you don't know what 20, when I was 17, I thought I was going to be a quarterback. When I was 19, I thought I was going to be a pediatrician. When I was 22, I thought I was going to be an investment banker. I got a job in the investment bank.

24:46Scott Galloway:I ended up in business intelligence and analytics. I didn't even know what that meant until I was 25 or 26. So try and find some. Your job in your 20s is to workshop and find something you're good at and maybe could be in the top 10 or the top 1%. And forgive yourself if it doesn't involve college because two-thirds of kids don't end up in college and there's this industrial shaming complex. I've been at these parties. Did you hear Max dropped out of Rutgers? It's like, oh, shame, shame. The parents have fucked up. The kid is a failure. Two-thirds of our kids do not end up with a college degree.

25:23Scott Galloway:Workshop stuff, find something you could be good at, maybe great. It might be being a tax accountant. Okay. Do you understand, are you willing to go to college? Are you willing to get a CPA? Do you understand numbers? Do you understand the tax code? Are you good with clients? Because if you can become in the top 10 % or the top 1 % of tax lawyers, those people get to fly private and have a broader selection set of mates than they deserve, which makes them really passionate about the tax law. I am so passionate about analytics because it gave me the ability to take care of my kids, take care of my dad, have crazy outrageous vacations, and remove stress from my key relationships.

26:01Scott Galloway:Passion comes from artistry, mastery, and economic security. So whatever that thing is that gives you the ability to make some good money that you're good at, maybe even great at, in an industry that's not sexy, you're going to be compassionate about it. I'm building a home right now in London and there's the soapstone guy or the marble guy and he's this Iraqi immigrant and everybody knows him. He can tell you everything about the veining and the marble and I was very open with him and he's been open with me. He makes 2.1 million pounds top line. He has a marble company. He clears about 800 ,000.

26:35That's pretty good margins.

26:36Scott Galloway:Yeah, he's a guy in his 40s. He's been in marble since he was 28. And he's passionate about marble and soapstone because it affords him a really nice life. And he's great at it. And he gets a lot of camaraderie. He gets a lot of prestige, relevance, pride, ability to take care, to be economically secure. So the first thing is focus. Second thing is I call it stoicism. But the one thing that's in your control is spending. You got to develop a savings muscle when you're young and see if you can get alignment with your roommates or your romantic partner and gamify saving money. You got to figure out, you got to have a savings muscle that you can flex.

27:21Scott Galloway:When I was a junior in UCLA, I wasn't going back for my senior year unless I saved$3 ,000 through the summer. I had 11 weeks to save$3 ,000, earn and save. So everyone in the fraternity knew who the four kids were who didn't have money. I went to UCLA. I was in a fraternity with mostly Jewish kids in the valley. They all had money. There were four of us that everybody knew were broke. Like our parents weren't helping us. We moved in together in a room in the house and we had a whiteboard and we gamified spending. I spent$78 a week including rent and food for 12 weeks. I ate top ramen, bananas, and milk.

27:55Scott Galloway:My big treat is every Sunday night I'd go to Sizzler. You ask your parents. And for$4.99, I was on the crew team. The entire crew team would go, and we would go there at 3 p.m. when it opened, and we'd stay till 8 p.m., and we would just eat several million calories. And it was fun. I mean, would I rather have more money? Yeah. But the ability to gamify and especially with a partner, save money and start investing, if you're young, you've got to figure out that savings muscle. And it's getting reward from other things, getting reward from fitness, from friends. The nice thing about being young is you don't need as much money to have fun.

28:31Scott Galloway:There's this Instagram generation that thinks you got to have a Birkin bag or go to Coachella, have fun. When you're in your 20s, pretty much like beer and making out is a pretty good brap. There's a lot of cheap shit out there available for 20-somethings. Plus, you can't really do it after you're married. Yeah, then it gets much harder. Or actually, it doesn't get harder. It stays in Austin, Polly, though. It doesn't get harder. It gets much more expensive. That's true. Anyways, I call it stoicism, but getting a savings muscle. The third is time. For the majority of our time on this planet, we haven't lived past 35.

29:05Scott Galloway:So young people just cannot imagine they're going to live to be 100. And most of them are. And they also can't calibrate how fast time is going to go. Wow, my life has gone really slowly, said no one ever. If you, from the age of 22, just figure out a way to get 2%, 3%, 5 % of your income out of your hands, 99 % of us will spend everything that comes into our hands. You have the brightest people in the world with a godlike technology hitting you at the exact right moment, a chance to upgrade from economy to economy comfort, to add flourless chocolate cake with your panini, whatever it is, right?

29:41Scott Galloway:Telling you you deserve this. It's worth it. Oh, there's two people looking at this hotel room. There's only one left. Buy now. Find a forced savings mechanism, 2 % to 5 % in your 20s. When you're my age, you're going to be fine. You don't start until you're 30s, that's fine, but it's going to need to be 5 % to 10%. It's going to be closer to 15 % to 20 % when you're in the 40s. But you're going to live longer than you think. Time is going to go fast. Well, I'm only going to get 9 % in the markets. Well, okay, that means in 24 years it's going to be up eightfold. So the power of compound interest and time.

30:13Scott Galloway:And then the final thing where I really screwed up was the power of diversification. And that is I've always made a lot of money. I came out of the gates hot, started new commerce companies, and I was raised in the or came of a professional age where you were told, be in it to win it, go deeper, go deeper. And my company was about to go public, and I was that guy that borrowed money against his stocks to buy more stock. So when 2000 hit, I went from looking at jets, no joke, to broke. Clawed my way back, 2008, all my money was in tech again, boom, broke again. And that was about the time my first son came along, which was really upsetting.

30:51Scott Galloway:But diversification is your Kevlar. And that is, two weeks ago, I found out I made one of my biggest investments. I invested$5 million in a tech-based healthcare company, tier one VCs, baller CEO, best investors. Had to elbow my way to get in. That's a big investment for me. It went out of business last week. That's a zero for me. But I don't invest more than 3 % or 4 % of my net worth in any one thing. So it ruined my hour, but it didn't even ruin my day. and it certainly didn't ruin my week. Diversification is your Kevlar. The moment you have anything resembling an asset base, you want to try and take pieces of it and put it in stuff that is uncorrelated as possible.

31:32I'm about to invest in an aircraft maintenance company

31:35Scott Galloway:in El Salvador. I just want anything that's away from my tech world. I love, I now appreciate diversification because once you have an asset base, the way you get rich is probably through a little bit of concentration, your own business, you double down on a house, you fix it up, you flip it, whatever it might be. But the way you stay somewhat rich is through diversification. And I didn't realize that. I was always reading these stories about Steve Ballmer borrowing stock, Fred Smith doubling down on FedEx, Mark Zuckerberg never selling a share. No, diversify. Because here's the thing, the market will always trump individual performance.

32:15Scott Galloway:And no matter how good you are, If you're in tech in 2000, you're going to get hurt. Amazon lost 90 % of its value from 99 to 2001. And then also a little bit of forgiveness. Recognize that when your stocks go down, recognize when you have a business fail, that most of it is not your fault. And at the same time, when you kill it and you buy a stock and it doubles and you were smart enough or lucky, you weren't smart enough to buy NVIDIA three years ago. You were lucky enough. You are never more prone to a big mistake than after a big win. Bring in your horns. So I wish I'd learned diversification.

32:52Scott Galloway:I didn't save money in my 20s and 30s. My first feeling when my son came marching out of my girlfriend, it was supposed to be bright lights and angels singing. I felt so nauseous. And I thought, well, okay, in addition to childbirth being gross, which I think it is, I felt incredible shame because I was sitting there at 40 years old. I'd made so much fucking money and I was broke because I wasn't smart enough to diversify. Because I thought, oh, I'm such a baller that my company is going to be worth a billion dollars, so I'm going to keep doubling down. So my first sentiment when I saw my son was I failed this kid.

33:28Scott Galloway:And I want to help young people realize I don't want anyone to ever feel that way. And you don't need to be a billionaire. Just start saving some money. Real estate's a great for savings. Figure out a way to get it out of your hands. Keep saving. And just in case you don't go double platinum or have a podcast that's number one or have a movie or buy NVIDIA, you don't need it. I can get you rich. That's the good news. The bad news is the answer is slowly. So what I would tell young people is even if you don't end up in an amazing job, if you start early and you follow this pattern, you're going to be economically fine.

33:59That's such a good point. I think there's a lot of porn these days about sleeping on floors, sleeping on couches, and that that's the only way to make it too. And that if you want to be successful, you have to go all in on your business. And I don't know about you, but I never wanted to do that. I never wanted to sleep on the floor if I didn't have to. Yeah. I didn't want to have to sacrifice everything early on. I wanted to work really, really, really hard. But I think in finance, we get lucky because we learn that from an early age. And for most young people today, if they watch anybody who's had success, they go, well, they went all in.

34:33And it goes back to your point. I don't think I'm a top one percenter. I think we should all have a little bit more humility. Assume you're going to fail more and then you won't. And then I always giggle when people say they want to be a DJ. You go, you know how to become a DJ? Become the CEO of Goldman Sachs. It's more likely.

34:48Scott Galloway:DJ soul. Yeah. And you buy your way onto the stage. You know who else buys their way onto the stage? Paris Hilton. Shaq. 100%. How does Shaq make his money? Fucking chicken stores now. And car washes, which I love as well. So I think you're right. Well, I went to the US Open and I thought, okay, I'd rather be Nadal or Federer. the number three or number four ranked tennis player i'd rather be because i get to go to the u.s open and sit in great seats and i'm not stressed and throwing up in the you know i'd rather be the number one or number two player in the world i just was i coach a lot of young men and i had this kid he got into mit and he got and but he had a chance to play basketball he's played basketball his whole life at what i call a pretty mediocre school like boss go to mit and buy a basketball team in 20 years.

35:37Scott Galloway:What are you thinking? The sports is a terrible business. If you do the math on what's required to become a basketball player, it is much easier to win the lottery. It's just crazy. So you need to have, what I tell young people is you can't have it all, you just can't have it all at once. And you need to have a sober conversation around the trade-offs. and a lot of times what people don't take into account is, you know, you can control your spending and there's nothing wrong with cutting your spending and saying, I'm not going to live to work, I'm going to work to live. Well, fine, but you're going to need to lower your cost of living and there's nothing wrong with moving to St.

36:16Scott Galloway:Louis and dual incomes, make 80 or 100 grand. You can get a home for that, have a really nice life. But be clear, if you expect to live in New York and you expect to have, But I survey my kids. When I say my kids, I mean my students, 70 % to 80 % of them expect to be in the top 1 % of incomeers by the time they're 35. Do they realize it's the top 1 %? Well, no, because I think the top 1 % income now is like$700 ,000. They don't think of that as that much money. I mean, the average compensation at NYU Stern is$212 ,000 first year. So they think, okay, within seven, eight years, I should be making$600 ,000 or$700 ,000.

36:53Scott Galloway:And a lot of them will. but if you expect to be in the top 1 % and maintain a lifestyle in New York or LA or one of the super cities, you're going to have to work pretty hard. You're going to have to, you know, I had some fun growing up, but I don't, I would say that from the age of kind of 25 to 45, it didn't really do anything but work. And it comes at a real price. I lost, I would say I lost my hair, I lost my marriage and it was worth it. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I do think you either get to choose short-term or long-term pain. That's right. And I wish somebody had told me that earlier.

37:28Scott Galloway:Which is it? I never liked to when, you know, when they play those videos, like the reaction videos of the girl crying because life's hard and then they make fun of her. And that never really sits that well with me because I think it's because we kind of failed them. We didn't tell them it's going to be fucking awful. Your first job is not supposed to kill you from how hard it is. It's supposed to kill you from the pure monotony of like labor. What was your first job? finance. Yeah, mine too. Yeah. And so, yeah, 80-hour weeks, taking all the Series 7, 24, 63, all that jazz. And I was the dumbest and the least qualified and didn't have any fancy friends or family.

38:06But it was also awesome because I learned massive pain tolerance really young. Well, it's a great training. Yeah. And I think that's probably what we should tell them instead, that your first job's going to suck, but eventually it'll be worth it.

38:17Scott Galloway:Well, what I would say is that, you know, it's like rearing children. It gets better. We're told a lie that it's going to be great, at least for me. I think babies are awful. I couldn't stand the first two years. I thought it was just torture. I thought my job was just to make sure this thing didn't get near a body of water and keep it alive. And I didn't find it that rewarding. Do things make you happy though? You seem to have like a steady state of unhappiness. Here's the good news. I hate my life less and less every day. But what I say about kids is two to five, it gets kind of fun. And then five to 15 is amazing.

38:50Scott Galloway:And then you kind of lose them again. I'm going through that right now. What's your oldest? 17. Okay. So you haven't seen the other side yet. Yeah. No. Maybe that's good. I'm waiting for that. We'll see. Okay. We'll see. It's hard to believe it when they don't call them and they don't... It's like that Tina Fey thing where you have a crush on somebody. My son was in town doing his college to it. I'm like, would you like to grab coffee? I mean, you're probably busy, and I'm busy, but if you're free, I could find time, but you probably don't want to. I mean, it's just my, you'll never find people less impressed with you than your teenagers.

39:22Scott Galloway:But anyways, look, everything's a trade-off. You just have to decide what you want to trade off and when and how much. And I get it. I'm not going to tell kids to give up their 20s. Have some fun, spend some money, try and find a little bit of money to put away. And also just recognize your first job, even if you don't like it, give it a couple of years, give it two or three years to see if it gets better. But also recognize you may not end up in your dream job right out of college. Few of us do, but that's a learning. I went into investment banking. I worked at Morgan Stanley. I hated it. They hated me.

39:58Scott Galloway:I was terrible at it. And that was a learning. But it was really good training because it gave me intention to detail. It gave me kind of the ability to suffer a little bit. It taught me a little bit about working in a large organization. It also told me I don't have the skills to be in a big company. I'm too insecure. Anytime people went into a conference room, I would think they were talking about me. I didn't have patience or maturity. If I met someone senior to me that I think was as smart as me, I'd get angry that they were making I mean, I just was too immature to handle a big company. And people romanticize entrepreneurship.

40:34Scott Galloway:I went into entrepreneurship at a defense mechanism. I mean, I'm just not going to be successful. I met my stalemate from Morgan Stanley who's been in investment banking for 30 years now. We were both very transparent about our wealth. We ended up in almost the same spot economically. He's endured much less stress than me. Right. If you have access to corporate America, the U.S. corporation is the greatest wealth creator in history. The reality is most of us don't have the skills. We don't have the patience. It's not easy to get up and put on a tie. It's not easy to go to corporate events and pretend to like the boss's husband.

41:09Scott Galloway:This shit is not easy. It's awful. And be thoughtful and be patient. And occasionally you're going to suffer injustice. People less intelligent and less hardworking are going to get promoted. There's injustice everywhere. But if you can endure those injustices, typically over time, the American corporation is a great way to get wealthy slowly. And the majority of entrepreneurs, I think, do it out of – I mean, the majority of entrepreneurs are immigrants. They can't go to work for Google. They didn't get to go to work for Dartmouth. So when kids come to my office hours, they think – they say, oh, I have an offer from J.P.

41:44Scott Galloway:Morgan, but I think I'm starting my own business. They think I'm going to break into song and say, go for this small business. I'm like, fuck that. J.P. Morgan, here you come. Well, it's true. I mean, I was at Goldman. Like, I was a shitty little peon analyst back in the day for two years. And I hated my life for all two years of it. And to this day, you know, whatever, 12, 13 years later, it's still like Cody Sanchez. Yeah, she's on these businesses. She's got this online thing. She also worked at Goldman Sachs. I'm like that. Huge credibility. Huge credibility. And I hear they spend like about$100 ,000 a year training new members.

42:14So that's probably the cheapest university you can get is a.

42:18Scott Galloway:Great training. Is a corporate MBA, basically. Great, incredibly smart peers. The way I describe it, it's like having served in the Marines, you're really glad you did it past tense. Yep. But see, I've started a bunch of business, but what did I roll out first? That I was at Morgan Stanley. Yeah. Because we all are proud of our brands and the institutions. But anyone who, right out of college, can go get a graduate degree called a U.S. corporation, I would say do it. you might be good at it. And if not, it's going to help you zero on what you're good at. And they do these crazy things called health insurance and retirement plans and training.

42:56Scott Galloway:First thing they did was they sent me to Columbia for this mini MBA. Yeah, I got my MBA at Georgetown through State Street. There you go. Same thing. I mean, it would have cost me$160 ,000 is what the executive program at Georgetown cost. That's crazy. It's crazy. And I mean, I had a hell of a time, but I think the most valuable thing I've ever done was work in corporations and start a business, not my MBA. I think that's, yeah, like everyone has a path. I describe business school for the elite and the aimless. You're good at what you do. You're smart. You want to make money. You're disciplined, but you have no idea what you want to do.

43:31Scott Galloway:We all try to sound very focused in our business school applications, but if you were really good and knew what you wanted to do, you don't need a graduate degree. You just go do it unless you want to be a lawyer or a doctor. That's a great point. Business school is for those of us who were trying to figure it out. Career switches. All the investment bankers wanted to be consultants because we didn't want to give up the money. We just knew we hated investment banking. All the consultants wanted to be investment bankers. We would think we'd get together and be like, hey, it sucks over here. But it is a great way to figure out what you'll like more and also get a great credential.

44:04Scott Galloway:For the first time, business school is not a no-brainer. When I applied, it was a no-brainer. Tuition was$2 ,000 a year. My total tuition to UCLA and Berkeley as an in-state student was$7 ,000 for seven years, total tuition, and 76 % admissions rate at UCLA. I graduated with a 2.27 GPA, true story, and Berkeley let me into graduate school. Things have changed dramatically. And I'm now a good citizen. I pay a lot of taxes. I give a lot of money back to those alma mater. So I would argue their really slack admission standards was the right way to go. Fascinating. What do you think about, you know, one of the other things that seems to me leads to success long-term if people actually want to quote unquote win monetarily is like a massive ability to handle failure.

44:50You, I think, are really interesting because you're very, you know, you're not quiet about your opinions. If they don't turn out to be right, you go, well, here's my thought process. That seemed reasonable. It worked or it didn't, but I'm going to at least say the quiet part out loud and we can see how I tracked one way or the other. How did you get comfortable being wrong publicly and getting over it?

45:12Scott Galloway:Being wrong a lot? I don't think you're wrong a lot, by the way. I'm wrong often. I get a lot of strength from my atheism. That's fascinating. Why? You just don't think anything matters? To a certain extent. And that is, I'm convinced that at some point I'm going to look into my kids' eyes and know our relationship is coming to an end. And it's going so fast. And everyone who I'm worried about their opinion or being shamed by, they're going to be dead really soon. And so am I. So I think a recognition of the finite nature of life and your insignificance gives you a little bit more courage to try and squeeze as much juice out of this lemon as physically possible.

45:53Scott Galloway:And I do try to live out loud. And when I screw up, I try to forgive myself because when someone else publicly fails, when they say something stupid or they have a business fail, most people will never be entrepreneurs because they don't want to risk public failure. It's humiliating. It's my biggest fear. Most guys, especially nowadays, don't approach a woman they're attracted to because they're worried about rejection. And what you realize or what I realize, and it's been my superpower, is my ability to move through fail. My superpower is rejection. I ran for sophomore, junior, and senior class president in high school.

46:25Scott Galloway:I lost all three elections. And based on my track record, I decided to run for student body president where I went on to wait for it, lose. I've started nine companies. Four have failed, three are kind of a tie, got the money back, and two were hits. All you need is one. One out of seven businesses succeeds. So I started nine. And my superpower was when I had a business fail or when I was divorced or when I lost my mom, I knew how to mourn and I knew how to move on. And the only thing I can guarantee anyone is you're going to have a certain amount of tragedy and a certain amount of joy in your life.

47:04Scott Galloway:The ratio of those things, some of it's out of your control, where and when you're born, a lot of luck, health of your loved ones. But the thing that's in your control is your ability to move through that failure. And I've been shot in the face professionally and personally. And I was always able to say, okay, my business failed, learned a lot. I'm going to go raise more money and start a new business. What does that look like? Like right after you lose an election or you fail on a business, what do you do? Do you sit with like a whiskey? No, I think it's different for everybody. What I would suggest is everyone needs to find things that make them feel good about themselves.

47:44Scott Galloway:What do you do? Well, I have, so this isn't going to come as a surprise to you. I struggle with anger and depression. I'm very cognizant of it. And I have a series of kind of activities to try and when I feel like I'm going dark, what's weird is failure or adversity doesn't send me into a depression. Other things do. So I think it's probably more chemical with me, but everyone needs to figure out how do I maintain a sense of enthusiasm? I have so many really successful friends, came out of Ivy League school, started hedge funds, got to a billion under management. We're making two, three, 10 million bucks a year.

48:19Scott Galloway:And then the market goes south on them. There's a bunch of redemptions. Their fund closes down. And for the next five to 10 years, they're like stuck. They can't get past the failure. And it's not hitting a home run. It's your ability to just get to the plate as many times because at some point you're going to connect. So my cognitive behavior or tricks for trying to bust out of a depression, when I feel myself going dark, I have an acronym SCAFA. The first thing I do is I sweat. Exercising resets everything for me. It's like pressing the reset buttons. Yeah, you're fit. Well, I'm trying. I'm holding on to every last vestige of my youth.

49:01Scott Galloway:C, clean. I try and eat at home. Not a lot of butter or salt, which I find is really helpful. Abstinence. in the sense that I love alcohol and I love THC. I'm a better version of me, a little bit fucked up. I love being high. I love marijuana. I love alcohol. I'm really good at both of those things. And I think like, I'm like most people, they're an enhancement to my life and I know how to control them mostly. But when I'm feeling depressed, I just take them out of my life. Whatever's happening to those sensors in my brain, I just don't want to fuck with them. F is for family. My kids are so awful that they forced me to take myself out of my own head and stop focusing on my own shit.

49:40Scott Galloway:They're just, if I can be around my boys, I know that they will come up with reasons why I need to focus on them. That's actually quite healthy. And the A is affection. I will tell my kids, jokingly, I'm not feeling good. And they know that means we watch TV, they'll throw their legs on mine. I let my dogs on the couch. Physical mammal touch, I think it's very restorative to me. So whenever I feel myself going dark and the way I feel myself going dark is I start just getting pissed off at everyone and everything. And I start feeling really down on myself. I get quiet. I get withdrawn and have trouble sleeping.

50:15Scott Galloway:And I'm like, but I've gotten to a point where I recognize it and I can snap out of it. But your ability to move through failure, your ability to endure it, you want to punch above your weight class professionally or romantically, get used to rejection. Most people aren't willing to endure rejection. You stop caring about it after a while, I think. You kind of inculcate yourself against it. I've had disasters professionally. I've had a company go chapter 11. I've had stocks 18 months after I invested go to zero, and I can get through it. I don't mind it. I've been single. I can't tell you the amount of rejection I've endured from women.

50:56Scott Galloway:And that's the reason I'm with somebody who's much higher character and much hotter than me is all the women who reject. I was fine. I could get past it. I could get past it. I wasn't scared of approaching people to ask for money, to ask them to come to work for me, to ask them to be my clients, to ask them to go on a date with me. That is the key to my success is an abundance of rejection. This is a slightly inappropriate question, but have you ever tried psychedelics? and that doesn't make you less of an atheist ever? No. Like have you done like where you do the whole thing and you put on the eye mask and you lay down and you see the spirit world?

51:36I did it in Austin actually.

51:38Scott Galloway:Yeah, that tracks. Yeah, I did. I just did a massive hit of ketamine. Yeah. That's the only time I've ever really done psychedelics other than mushroom chocolate. I loved it. It was a ton of fun. I learned a lot. About yourself? Just intentional about, I went in very intentional. What is my purpose? What is my purpose? Yeah. No, I'm pretty convinced that that whole death thing is going to be just a wonderful long sleep. I don't. And by the way, I want to acknowledge that as an atheist, our belief that kind of the world was nothing and then it exploded, that's pretty ridiculous too. I don't want to in any way try and foo-foo religion or faith.

52:14Scott Galloway:I think it's a tremendous source of comfort for people. I've always enjoyed going to church and temple. I like the community. But no, I don't have an invisible friend. And I think at some point this is, I don't think this is a dress rehearsal. I think this is my first and last act. There's something beautiful about that, though. I always loved that Emma Bombeck quote where she says, when I stand before God at the end of my days, I hope I can say to him that I have not one drop left. I use everything he gave me. Right. And I think she was an atheist. So it's funny that she used God in the quote.

52:42But I think that's kind of what she meant. She's like, just leaving it on the line. Like, whatever's left.

52:46Scott Galloway:Yeah, leave it on the field. What was the great, was it a Mexican artist, Frida Marina, the one with the unibrow? Oh, Frida Kahlo. Frida Kahlo. She had this great quote. She said, I want my exit to be glorious and I don't want to come back. Oh, that's on brand for you. There you go. I like that one. Me and Frida. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Okay. I could see that in one of your next thumbnails for one of your podcasts. Okay. I want to talk a little bit about, I want to talk slightly about young men today. Because I think increasingly you're talking to them in particular in a way that's not so hard, bro.

53:19You got to do X, Y, and Z. It's like sophisticated, which I think speaks to a lot of this generation. Yeah. What's the deal with young men doing more video games and opting out and not asking women to go out on dates? What are we doing and how do you get around that as a young man?

53:37Scott Galloway:Well, first let's look at the numbers. There's no group globally that's ascended faster than women. There are more women globally seeking tertiary education than men. And when you look at, there's probably 40 or 50 nations that don't allow women to seek tertiary education. Actually, I don't know if that's true. Does tertiary mean university? Yeah, higher education, college and graduate education. More women are in graduate school now, higher education globally than men. That's a wonderful thing. In the last 30 years, the number of women elected to some form of parliament or electoral body has doubled.

54:08Scott Galloway:Women are killing it. And by the way, I don't think there's anything we should do to get in the way of that. Single women own more homes than single men. Women under the age of 30 in urban centers are making more money than men. In the next five years, there's going to be three female college grads for every two male college grads. Two out of three women under the age of 30 has a boyfriend. One out of three men under the age of 30 has a girlfriend. Why? Because women are dating older. Why are they dating older? We are producing way too few economically and emotionally viable men. And there's a variety of reasons.

54:40Scott Galloway:There's straight biology. Men's prefrontal cortex is about 18 months behind. When you applied to college, when there was another senior from your high school who was a male, you were basically applying, you were competing against a junior. We're less mature. Boys mature later. They catch up at about 25. But at 18, they're basically a 16 and a half year old girl. School education is highly biased against boys. If you think about the behavior we want in school. It's sit still, be organized, be a pleaser, raise your hand. You're describing a girl. Schools that are just boys only end up with twice the amount of recess time because boys are like dogs.

55:20Scott Galloway:They need to be tired. They need to be kind of worn out. In addition, there's some societal factors that have been especially rough on boys. We have the second most single parent homes in the world. And if you reverse engineer where a boy comes off the tracks, it's when he loses a male role model. And what's interesting in the studies is that girls in single-parent homes have the same outcomes, same college attendance, same rates of depression. All the studies show that while physically stronger, boys are emotionally and mentally much weaker. So they're not going to college. They're not mating.

55:54Scott Galloway:They're not dating. Half of millennial men say they are no longer dating. They're no longer even trying. This is like the incel movement. They're much more prone. Online dating, it used to be family, friends, and school, how you met people. Now it's 70 % online. And we don't like to talk about this because we like to sort of... And so, assume that every problem men facing is kind of their own fault and that any problem facing women, it's because they're victimized. And if you look at online dating, basically, most women want the same guy. And that is, if you have 50 men on Tinder, 50 women, 46 of the women will show all of their attention to just four men.

56:31Scott Galloway:They all want the same dude. And so, that leaves 46 men vying for the attention of four women. So a man of average attractiveness on Tinder has to swipe right 200 times to get one match. So that's one coffee. And then four of the five coffees will ghost him because their filter kicks in again. So a man of average attractiveness has to swipe right 1 ,000 times to get one coffee. So he gets what he feels is validation of his lack of worth in the mating market. They're much more prone to addiction. They're much more prone to conspiracy theory. They're much less likely to leave home. So what you have is an entire generation of men without male role models who are more prone to addiction and who start engaging.

57:14Scott Galloway:They become much more prone to misogynistic content. They start blaming women. They become more nationalistic. They start blaming immigrants. They stop believing in climate change. And some, they become really shitty citizens. And the ripple effect it's having is the mating market. And that is three-quarters of women say economic viability is key in a mate. It's only one in four men. We don't care. men are disproportionately evaluated on their economic well-being, women disproportionately evaluated on their aesthetics. But when the pool, men made horizontally and down socioeconomically, women horizontally and up.

57:47Scott Galloway:But when the pool of horizontal and up of men is shrinking every year, there's just less household formation and there's more loneliness. And if you talk to couples that have been married longer than 30 years, three quarters will say one was much more interested in the other in the beginning. And it was always the man was much more interested. because the downside of sex is so much greater for women than men, men are much less choosy. Men feel like their obligation is to spread their seed to the four corners of the earth. Women's obligation is to be as filtered as possible, as selective as possible about inbound opportunities and pick the strongest, smartest, and fastest seed.

58:24Scott Galloway:So what you have is men, essentially women are much choosier than men. And when they're not going to church, not going to softball league, not going into work, men have very few venues to demonstrate excellence. What you find with these couples is the woman says, I wasn't interested in him, but then I found out he's really kind. I liked his hands. I liked the way he smelled. I saw him present to a client. I started getting attracted to him. He made me laugh. How do you demonstrate excellence as a man when there's no venues where you're around other people for extended period of time doing something different.

59:03Scott Galloway:I was just in Israel at the Nova Music Festival Memorial, and I met this battalion of IDF soldiers, 90 men, 90 women, all outside, all fit, all meeting each other. They're finding mentors. They're finding business partners, co-founders. They're finding mates. Where does a young man demonstrate excellence? If everyone's meeting online and everyone wants the same dude, it creates a few things. It creates a cadre of men who feel like they've been rejected by women. And it creates this environment. If you're in the top 10 % of men, it's never been better. But it creates this Porsche polygamy environment where the guys who are kind of the most attractive males, quite frankly, they have so much opportunity, it doesn't encourage long-term good behavior.

59:49Scott Galloway:So you end up with a cohort of men who feel totally rejected, and you have women who have found dating just across the spectrum is just a little shittier. that the guy they want is not interested in a long-term relationship and everyone else, really, they don't have venues to kind of, if you will, fall in love. And the result is loneliness. And so I worry about young men not engaging with work, not engaging. One of three jobs used to require a college degree. Now it's two in three. And in some universities in the Northeast, it's two to one women to men. So they aren't getting the qualifications.

1:00:25Scott Galloway:They're much more prone to addiction. And the deepest resource companies in the world are all trying to convince young men that they can have a reasonable facsimile of life online. You don't need friends. Go to Reddit and Discord. You don't need to work. Just trade crypto or stocks on Coinbase or Robinhood. You don't need to shower, get in shape, have a plan, endure rejection, get out of the house, figure out how to make a woman laugh, be persistent, endure rejection, you got you porn. So you have, and I feel as if almost we're developing a subspecies of mostly males that are totally asocial, asexual.

1:01:02Scott Galloway:And once they get kind of into their mid late twenties, they're still living at home and they haven't developed those skills around socialization. I don't want to say they don't become savable, but they become very hard to pull out again. And the people I hear from most on this, when I started talking about this three years ago was accused of being misogynist because there's a gag reflex from a lot of feminists who are like, oh shit, it's Andrew Tate again. Not recognizing that having empathy for men doesn't mean you're anti-women. There needs to be a more productive conversation. Civil rights didn't hurt white people.

1:01:35Scott Galloway:Gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage. Nor acknowledging the issues facing men doesn't hurt women. Young men are four times as likely to kill themselves. They're three times as likely to be addicted. They're three times as likely to be homeless, they're 12 times as likely to be incarcerated. If there was any special interest group that was killing themselves at four times the rate of the control group, we'd move in with programs. Going to NYU down the block, you're going to see Black Women's Support Group, Women in Consulting, Golden Seeds, Venture Capital for Women. They're really on a lot of support groups for young men because of the privilege I recognized, because of the fact that men have had a 2 ,000-year Head Start, we're kind of holding 19-year-olds accountable, 19-year-old males.

1:02:18Scott Galloway:And what we're finding is there's real knock-on effects in our society. And generally speaking, when I hear from these mothers, they say the following. I got three kids, two daughters, one son. One daughter's in Chicago in TR, one daughter's at Penn, and my son is in the basement playing video games and vaping. So less mature brains, less opportunity educationally. A lot of the jobs that were on-ramps into a good middle-class life have been outsourced or offshored. A mating market that is crowding into the most attractive males and leaving everyone else out. Fewer third spaces for people to meet and fall in love and mate and have children.

1:02:56Scott Galloway:And it's leading in a technology sector that is trying to convince men you don't need to get out of the house. You can stay at home. And I relate to these men. I was one of them. I didn't have a lot of prospects when I was younger. living with my mother, and I could have easily just gone down a very bad path. So I think this is something that is a real societal issue. I think the biggest threats to our society aren't climate change or even income inequality. I think it's one, extremism from the far left and the far right, and two, I think it's loneliness. I think you're right. Well, I mean, you see when you go to war-torn countries, and I spent a lot of time building businesses in Latin America, you know what civil unrest looks like.

1:03:38It looks like a lot of fighting age men on the side of the streets without anything else to do. And if you've been through, I mean, Kareem's sitting over here, and he's from Egypt and has seen all around the Middle East, and I've traveled the Middle East and Latin America, and you can feel what it feels like to be in an area where there is a different kind of powder keg, which is young men that, you know, understandably so, have more aggression, more testosterone, and feel like there's no outlet. Yeah, 100%. You know what's interesting, though? A small little spark of of light, I think. You know, we're in Austin, like I was telling you.

1:04:12And we've been trying to find a church. And so I'm Christian and grew up Catholic. And I wanted to find a place where we're going to have kids. I think it, like, makes sense. It's a good way to install ethics and morals, in my opinion. And so it's like, where else do you go where you can sort of teach these? Yeah, exactly. And so whether that's stoicism or Catholicism, whatever it is. And the damnedest thing happened. And we did a little tour, a group of churches to kind of see one we would like, because I think I would have PTSD from a Catholic church again. I just like too many wooden pews. But we went to this church called Red Rocks, like a New Age Christian church, which I kind of thought would freak me out.

1:04:53You know, like text to donate. Like, I don't know. It just kind of scared me. And yet when I walked in, I was shocked. All around were these really attractive young men and women. And they were like happy and they were meeting one another. And I went from church to church to church to church all around Austin, which is a pretty liberal place. And in each of these areas, I mean, we're talking 18-year-old kids to maybe 35-year-olds. They're meeting one another. And I thought, man, if you are sort of a lost young man or woman and you are white and maybe you come from a decent background, there's probably one place where you have your own little version of a safe space.

1:05:33And that might actually be a church.

1:05:35Scott Galloway:I think, look, when I coach young men, the first thing or exercise I do is I say, give me your phone, unlock it, I won't judge you. And we try and find eight to 12 hours on their phone, which is ridiculously easy between Twitter, TikTok, Coinbase. And then what do you have? You want to lean in your strengths. You have a lot of capital when you're young. It's human capital. You have a lot of time. So we're going to reallocate that capital to a higher ROI. First thing we're going to do is we're going to get fit. Right? We're going to sign up for classes. I don't care if it's berries or an app or the, you know, there's a great fitness, you know, the Aloe app has fitness classes.

1:06:12Scott Galloway:You go to whatever it is, F45, we're going to start getting fit. We're going to feel better about ourselves. We're going to feel more confident. Two, we're going to start making some money. If you have a phone, you can make money in this economy. I don't care if you're a Lyft driver, a tasker, task grabber, whatever they call it. You're going to start figuring, if you go to a construction site and you have any skills at all, you can start at about 20 bucks an hour. I don't care if it's four hours a day. The way you make a lot of money is by starting to make some money because you get a taste for flesh and you start thinking, wow, this money thing is awesome.

1:06:40Scott Galloway:And then the third thing we're going to do is at least three or four times a week, we're going to put ourselves in an environment with strangers in the agency of something bigger than us. It might be church. It might be a nonprofit. It might be a sports league. It might be a writing class. You have to be around strangers. And we write down, every time you're there, you got to meet somebody, a potential friend, a potential romantic partner, and you got to go up and introduce yourself. But being in that company of other people and the agency of something else like church, it's just incredibly important.

1:07:12Scott Galloway:And young men need those guardrails. Young men, one of the things I got at Morgan Stanley, excuse me, was how to read a room. Also, it's just so important. I think we talk about a code. I'm writing a book on masculinity. I think masculinity can be a decent code for a young man. And I think of a man is supposed to be kind of three things, a provider, a protector, and a procreator. And I think all three of those things are wonderful. And men should aspire to all three of those things and break down what it means to be each of them. But the only way you're going to get there is in the agency of others and being in communities.

1:07:51Scott Galloway:Men are dangerous when they sequester. When a woman doesn't have a romantic relationship, a lot of times she will pour that energy into her work, into her friends. She finds other places to give and receive love. They're much better at maintaining a social network. When a guy doesn't have a prospect of a romantic relationship, he stops showering. He stops looking for a job, right? And I remember this. When I was 23, my first girlfriend told me if I didn't stop smoking so much pot, she was going to stop having sex with me. And I was really enjoying that part of my life. So I got my shit together and I stopped smoking so much pot.

1:08:28Scott Galloway:Guys need guardrails. Young men need guardrails. That might be church. It might be the Marines. It might be a girlfriend. It might be Morgan Stanley that told me I couldn't party every night because it was really hard to get up at 630 and put on a tie and haul my ass downtown. But without guardrails, men don't demonstrate the same discipline as women in their early years or early adult years. It takes them a while to catch up. It's such a good point. Yeah, and I think also women out there too, like what a dumb thing. The whole, I always sort of giggle about the 6 '5", trust fund, blue eyes song.

1:09:01Because I'm like, I can't think of anything that would make me more miserable. Like who can't, height has no bearing on happiness. Neither does eye color. Sure, money actually decreases misery largely, but I don't think it increases happiness to a huge degree in a relationship. And so I hope at some point, women also start pushing back against some of these ideas. And I also wouldn't hold your breath. You know, I think, yeah, you're probably right. But, you know, I have a lot of friends who are my age. I'm a little older and they make money. Yeah. And and and at a certain point, they start to realize that, you know, maybe men don't want to date them as much because they're really narrowing their fields of who they will date.

1:09:41And so and a lot of the women, you know, women these days increasingly seem like the studies show that they don't want to date men theoretically who have different political views.

1:09:51Scott Galloway:So I always I always joke with my cousin because she's super liberal and she can't find a dude and she's super cute and she works hard. And and I jokingly send her the studies that say maybe you should date a conservative because young men her age are increasingly conservative. So it's just math. And also, by the way, polarity seems to work out pretty well for most of us. Maybe we should. My mom and dad had two different political perspectives for like our entire lifetime growing up. And now they're married for like 40 some odd years. Yeah, there's like there's something to the yin and the yang.

1:10:23Scott Galloway:I like that saying that the best marriages are one person loads a dishwasher like a Swiss architect, the other like a raccoon on meth. I'm the raccoon. Yeah, I'm the same way. My partner will make me load the dishwasher because she gets angry that I add no value. And I'm like, well, I've never had any value. Nothing's changed here. But then I load the dishwasher and she'll unload it and reload it. That's Chris, my husband, ex-military. You're doing it wrong. Yeah, 100%. You're doing it wrong. But there's, I mean, there's so many reasons. The thing I hate about men getting more conservative and women more progressive, it's yet another reason for people not to hook up.

1:11:00Scott Galloway:when I was dating, if I looked at all of my dates, all of my relationships, for the life of me, I would not be able to tell you what political affiliation they are. I know, right? It's like we've invented another reason for people to decide not to hook up. And what I tell men, the general advice, a lot of young people, how many times have you heard, I have all these great female friends, attractive, nice, high character, professionally, and they have their act together, and they can't find a man. That's not true. They can't find a man they want to date. That's true. And my general advice to men is you need to get your act together.

1:11:32Scott Galloway:You got to have a plan. What's your plan, right? Every woman is subjectively or implicitly or explicitly is going to try and figure out, does this dude have a plan? You don't need to be a baller. You don't need to have a fast car and a beautiful condo. But you need to have a plan. Like I am thinking about this shit. You need to demonstrate discipline. One way you demonstrate discipline is you're in really good shape. It says I have my act together. I know how to commit to something. I take pride in achievement. You got to have a plan, right? You got to be kind. You got to demonstrate a certain level of, I want to call it aggression, but you make the plans.

1:12:14Scott Galloway:This is where we're going to dinner. You have manners. You pay, right? None of this... I was talking to this guy the other day, I asked him about his date and he said, That's great. And we split the check. And I'm like, let me guess. You didn't have sex. I'm like, you're just, no one is ever going to kiss you. They'll all pretend that it's fine, you paying. And then she's not going to have sex with you. I do remember the one date where they did that. Like to this day, I remember the guy that did that. I was like, you want me to pay? And he was like, sure, you want to? And I was like, I'm going to fucking pay.

1:12:46Scott Galloway:Yeah, when women offer, that's the most hollow offer ever. And I know that's sexist, but there's evidence to back that up. Yeah, it's true. I tell my son, if they're in the company of women and they can't pay, they shouldn't go. Yeah. Or go somewhere for free. Yeah. Or do something. Go for a walk. That's totally fair. Go do a workout. Take a dog for a walk, whatever. I get it. Yeah. Whatever it is. But women are generally attracted to men for three reasons. The third is kindness. They want someone who's going to be a long-term partner. The second is intellect. If you're funny, really lean into it.

1:13:10Scott Galloway:Because the fastest way to communicate intellect and men who make good decisions, women are attracted to them because if you make good decisions, your kids are more likely to survive. But the number one is your ability to signal resources. Now, the easiest way to signal resources is to show up with a Rolex and a BMW. But also having a plan is signaling future resources, right? So you just have to be thoughtful about those. And what I tell men is you got to have your act together. You got to say, would you want to mate with you? Start. Start figuring out. Start looking in the mirror. Start looking the way you dress.

1:13:42Scott Galloway:Start. I mean, Christ, you have bad breath. I mean, what is it, man? Get your act together. Start becoming more attractive to you and to women. What I coach women around is what I call the second coffee. You can't tell women to lower their standards. That's just not. But what I say is if you go on a date and it's not sparks, but maybe it was nice, but you think, oh, there was no chemistry there. Give it a second date because a lot of couples that have been married found that the woman who's much finer filter, she started to find, he was able to demonstrate excellence over the medium term and she fell for him.

1:14:19Scott Galloway:Second coffee. coffee, like if, unless it's just awful or it does not, you know, I mean, I'm not going to tell anyone, I can't tell anyone to lower the standards, but give it a second coffee. You just don't know. And then the other thing I tell all young people, your default setting is yes. I have some friends going out. Yes, I'll come. Oh, there's a dinner. Oh, there's a lame corporate event. Yes, yes, yes. Return eye contact. And what I tell men is approach strangers. And if you express romantic interest or you go up to someone and they're not interested, you're both going to be fine. You're both going to be fine.

1:14:55And men get a lot of mixed signals in the professional world around the difference around where contact could be harassment.

1:15:03Scott Galloway:And I'm like, if you don't know the difference between expressing interest and harassing somebody, you have bigger problems. But something we don't like to talk about, one in three relationships begin at work. Yeah. And 99 % of them are consensual. That's my first husband. There's some horrific abuses of power in the workplace. Those people should be fired or worse. But it's okay to meet people at work. There's been 12 marriages at the companies I've started. I see that as a mitzvah. I think it's a wonderful thing. I love that. So anyways, I'm worried that young people, we aren't creating the economic stability, the economic prosperity, or even inventing the third spaces, whether it's church, national service, parks, leagues, nonprofits, a chance for them to meet, a chance for them to get together and quote unquote, fall in love.

1:15:54Scott Galloway:And we're regressing to a more primal vision of mating where a small number of men get to procreate. 80 % of women have procreated. It's only 40 % of men throughout history. And we're moving back. 80 % of, say that again? 80 % of women have procreated, have had a child. Only 40 % of men have. Because generally speaking, the middle class is an accident. A group of men in the middle who are attractive to women is an accident. It happened in World War II. Seven men came home from war. They demonstrated excellence. They were in uniform. They were in good shape. And the government flushed a bunch of money into their pockets with the GI Bill, the National Highway Act.

1:16:32Scott Galloway:So there were a lot of very attractive men coming home. And it started the baby boom. And these loving, supportive, confident households created this prosperity and this progressive outlook. We're like, let's give women a shot. Let's give non-whites a shot. Everybody, this prosperity and rights shoved into the middle class is such a wonderful thing. We should shove it into as many corners as possible. That's the greatest innovation in history. But it started with young people having more economic opportunity and quite frankly, a group of men that were more attractive to potential mates. And what we have in our society right now, unfortunately, is too many men who are just not economically or emotionally viable.

1:17:08Yeah, it's beautiful. What a beautiful disaster. I think where I kind of want to end is maybe not the most of high notes, but I think important to note, I love some of your writing on this. A little wrap up here. Let's talk about another boom, not the baby boom, but the LBO boom and what happened with leveraged buyouts in this country and what happened with sort of the few owning much, because I don't think the average person quite realizes what's happened right underneath our nose.

1:17:37Scott Galloway:Sure. I look at it mostly through the lens of... So I don't think... I'm not one of these people that thinks all private equity and buyout firms has been bad because I know a lot of dentists and people who own lawn care and people who own chiropractic clinics who have found liquidity by a private equity firm coming in and trying to consolidate the back end. So I think capital coming into the market is actually a good thing for people. Where I see a concentration of power is across industry. One firm controls two-thirds of all social media. One firm controls 93 % of the $300 billion search market.

1:18:12Scott Galloway:There's three chicken companies that control like 80 % of chicken. We have allowed so much concentration of power that the rents they can charge on consumers, on marketers go up every year. So Amazon 20 years ago, if you were a third-party marketer or a third-party resale are selling your products on Amazon. They took about 20 % of your gross dollar volume. Now they take 45 because they kind of own the market. If you don't sell on Amazon, you're kind of not selling online. So this concentration of power that has raised rents across corporate America and quite frankly, raised rents across parents.

1:18:47Scott Galloway:I know TikTok's bad. I know Snap's bad. How do I tell my kid to communicate with his friends back home if I get them off Snap? That's it. You know what? These companies have so much power. I'm going to tell my kid not to have an iPhone. So there's so much concentration of power that the rents have gotten greater and greater and greater. So I go more towards antitrust. I think there needs to be a lot of breakups. It's good for shareholders. When AT &T was broken up into the seven baby bells, all seven of those companies were worth more than the original AT &T within 10 years. Google hasn't really innovated.

1:19:22Scott Galloway:Search isn't much different than it was 10 years ago because they haven't needed to. They have 93 % share. They buy any company that threatens them. Microsoft, too, with the suite of products. I mean, they just basically recreate any product that comes out there in the marketplace that they can put inside of a Microsoft suite. That's right. And they're a perfect example of the power of antitrust because in 99, they were found guilty of monopoly abuse and they were ordered to break up. And even though they overturned the ruling, they stopped bundling and putting companies out of business. So if there hadn't been a DOJ ruling against Microsoft in 1999, we'd all be saying, I don't know, bang it.

1:19:58Scott Galloway:Google is a function of antitrust. So the ability, once companies get too big, breaking them up and auctioning the environment, there's more people, the rents for labor go up. Employees do better because there's more people bidding on their time. There's more tax revenue. Shareholders traditionally do well. PayPal used to be owned by eBay and they spun it. it's now worth, I think, 15 times what eBay is worth. So taxes, more taxes, more entrepreneurship, higher salaries, more shareholder value. The only person that loses is the CEO who generally wants to sit on the iron throne of all seven realms, not just Westeros.

1:20:34Scott Galloway:So I would argue the way to oxygenate the market would be to go through industry by industry and break up. Launching a tech company is really difficult right now. There's a lot of bigger players. And there's just a concentration of power across industry that is very hard to break into. And they donate a lot of money to Washington. There's regulatory capture. Why do I have to buy insurance to get a mortgage? Because they're in bed with each other, right? So I think there's a lot that can be done to make small business and bring down the costs for regular consumers through antitrust. The private equity market, I'm of two minds.

1:21:17Is there abuses when big players come in?

1:21:21Scott Galloway:Yes. But at the same time, I like a lot of capital in the market bidding on entrepreneurs' businesses. There's a person on the other end of that pool maintenance company that just got bought. That guy. His son doesn't want to go into it, right? And he's got a nice little business. And a private equity shop comes in and says, okay, I'll pay a million bucks for your business. You work here for four years and you have a way out. So I'm of two minds and I work with a lot of private equity firms. And I've generally found that they're good people trying to pay well. So I can understand that there's some situations where they come into a company, lever it up in debt, let it go out of business, raid the employee pension fund, I find a lot of that is a bit made for the business section of the New York Times.

1:22:13Scott Galloway:I don't think they're as mendacious as people think. Now, venture capitalists, I think that's another story. So I think there's some nuance there, but generally speaking, I'm a fan of capital coming into the small business market. Yeah, I totally agree. Well, I also think like to your point in the very beginning, everybody's looking for a way to make more with less risk. And so I think the concern is always not that private equity is evil or even the Google and all them are evil. It's just how do we make sure that our perverse incentives of always wanting to win individually do not overcome everything else.

1:22:46And so I get concerned when I see private equity go from owning 4 % of the private businesses to 20 % over a, depending on how you measure it, somewhere between a 10 and 12-year period. But man, you could say the big four are much more of an instigator on the public market than the private equity companies are on the private market.

1:23:06Scott Galloway:Seven companies are responsible for a third of the returns. One company, Apple, is worth more than the entire UK stock market. I mean, we have this illusion that the stock market is really robust. There's seven companies that are driving the majority of the return. If you tell me what stocks you have, I mean, If Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Meta, NVIDIA, Netflix, and I don't know if the other one's Microsoft, if you don't own one of those seven stocks, you've underperformed the market and your returns are probably flat. What do you think about people who say – the argument today is like Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock own, let's call it 80 % of the S &P and 40 % of the broad market.

1:23:50But then people will say, but they're passive. They're passive investors. What do you think about that? Do you think they actually change governance on most of our companies in the U.S. because they own them, or are they truly passive?

1:24:04Scott Galloway:It's a really interesting question. So concentration of ownership is just bad to begin with, although I would argue that those industries – I mean, it's an interesting question. So there's two sides to it. I love low-cost index funds. You want to have some fun. Everybody believes they're smarter than your average bear. I'm not immune. I stock big. But what I would tell young people is 70 % of any of your savings, well, 99 % of your savings is going to come from money you can't touch, whether it's equity or things that automatically go into a savings account. Low-cost index funds, I work with the brightest people in finance.

1:24:39I've advised the most prestigious VCs, private equity funds,

1:24:44Scott Galloway:and my sum net conclusion is no one has any idea. And the VCs that outperform are the ones that get better deal flow. But if you took the entire alternative investments industry, any logo on CNBC, anyone that advertises, any hedge fund, it's essentially a grift. And if you look at their performance, they've exactly underperformed the S &P by the amount of their fees. So Vanguard, low cost, SPY, index funds, I absolutely think that's the way to go. Now, whether those funds have become so big that they dictate corporate governance in their passive so they don't create enough churn with management?

1:25:19Scott Galloway:I don't know. I mean, it's an interesting theory how maybe they've created a stasis in the market. It's an interesting question. I don't have a viewpoint. Where I take from these is I tell people, they're like, oh, is it too late to buy NVIDIA? I'm like, I don't know, but it's not too late to buy an index fund. And your 27 cents on the dollar are going to go into the Magnum is in seven. So if they double, you're fine. But if the other 493 companies have their day in the sun, you're going to get to participate. And the market, especially in America, I wonder if emerging markets are about to finally have their day in the sun because the US market is actually pretty expensive.

1:25:54Scott Galloway:But along the lines of index or diversification, I would even suggest like index funds that have some exposure to foreign markets now because the US market looks historically expensive. But you don't need to be a hero. It's like what John Bogle from Vanguard said, you don't need to find the needle in the haystack, buy the whole goddamn haystack. And the amazing thing about humanity is that with population growth and innovation and technology, generally speaking over the medium and long term, we become more productive and the market goes up and to the right. So yeah, pretend you know more than everyone else, have an expensive lesson figuring out you don't, take a third, buy Dogecoin or buy whatever it is, you know, buy the new AI company, put 70 % into, and this is the key, low cost index funds.

1:26:42Scott Galloway:You're in this business. People don't realize how much of the returns are eaten up by fees. No, because they hide them and they think it's just an expense ratio. Well, 2%, that doesn't sound bad. That's a 30-year return. Yeah, 100%. And then you don't add the fund admin fees and anything you have inside of it. Yeah, I totally agree. I think Vanguard's a great place to invest, an awful place to work, unless you don't really like working that hard. Did you work there? Yeah. It's my first, it's socialism in a company. You know, there's no meritocracy. It's kind of like if you want to progress in the military, they go, cool, three years, like you're at this level and then at three years you can go somewhere else.

1:27:13That was my experience. It was a long time ago. That was right out of college. And, you know, when you're young and dumb, you're young and dumb. So I don't know how much of that was just like, I'm really good. And really I was an idiot who knew nothing. But I much preferred Goldman, even though it was hard and I was scared I was going to get fired all the time. But Vanguard's great because you can't get fired unless you like cuss in an email or maybe have like some version of harassment. You get a company match in your 401k that's really aggressive. They never fire anybody and you can climb the ladder as long as you stay there forever, but you can't go fast and that never worked that well for me.

1:27:51Scott Galloway:But those are different cultures and there's people for each of those cultures. 100%. Right? And I generally find the companies, it's proximity bias because I'm around very ambitious young people being at a business school. And you're in New York versus Malvern, Pennsylvania. Yeah. And what I found is that the best companies that really outperform the market have the culture of the following. We own your ass. You're going to have no life. But this is what we're going to do. If you want to go flat out, we're going to let you run as fast as you can. And we have 30-year-olds who are making a million bucks.

1:28:28Scott Galloway:And we don't look at them and go, your time will come. You'll be VP at 45. Don't worry. Roger's above you and he's been here 20. Like, you want to go flat out? We'll go as fast as you can run. But it's not balance. It's not paternity leave. It's not pet bereavement leave. It's not. The implicit agreement is if you go flat out here and you're good and you're talented and you devote your life to work, which is not for everybody, I'm going to put you where your parents were at 50 at 30. Yep. And there's a lot of people who want that culture. They're like, I want to go flat out. I want economic security.

1:29:08Scott Galloway:I'll have more balance when I'm older. There's also a lot of other people who are like, no, I want to work to live. I want to have kids. I want to have healthy relationships. I want to spend time with my parents. I want to be fit. I want to have weekends. and maybe in the summer take Friday off and go to the lake. They're probably happier. Yeah, they are probably happier. There's nothing wrong with that. And then one of my first consulting clients was Levi Strauss & Company. They were very maternal. It was summer Fridays. Mental health counseling, I mean, really cared about their employees. And Morgan Stanley was like, shut the fuck up.

1:29:47Scott Galloway:We'll give you feedback once a year, and it's called a check, and you'll find out what your bonus was when it hits your bank account. We didn't even get reviews. I remember that too. You got a number. Don't you remember when they were like, you get a bonus. You're like, how do you calculate it? Excuse me? Don't ask how you calculated this. Now my employees are like, can you please tell me how much you make and when? I'm like, what? Also good for you guys that you have the balls to ask this stuff. Yeah, quarterly reviews. Yeah. Yeah, the world's changed probably for the better. But the majority of the people I'm around, young people, want to go flat out.

1:30:18And the companies that usually outperform the market are the ones that create that culture

1:30:22Scott Galloway:around going kind of... The ultimate arbitrage in our economy is fossil fuels. But the second of that is finding young, super hardworking, super talented people who are better with technology and paying them 30 % of what you're paying Bob, who's a 40-year-old. And they add 90 % of the value. They're less mature. They're not very good managers. They're super smart. They don't have dogs or kids. So they're willing to kind of work all the time. That's the ultimate economic arbitrage in corporate America. And the companies that attract that secret sauce, that is very talented young people, outperform everyone else.

1:30:55That's such a good point. Yeah, today Tanner was like, oh, yeah, we've got some free time. We have 23 minutes in between meetings. We were giggling. I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what we want. Okay, last question. Elon Musk, do you not like the guy? You guys get at it at Twitter. Did he really call you insufferable? Did you just put that on a drift? What do we think about Elon Musk?

1:31:15Scott Galloway:No, he called me an insufferable numbskull. On Twitter? Yeah. Did you talk back to him? I don't even remember. I don't remember what I was saying. Yeah, it's not a big deal. And he's actually reached out to me through a friend saying we should get together. I like that. I like a little bit of, I think you got to push back even on the biggest billionaires. And they can handle it and they'll probably push back too. Yeah, look, the problem is we're in a culture where we've decided if someone or a company is a net positive. If I had a button that Elon Musk would have to go back to South Africa, I wouldn't push that button.

1:31:49Scott Galloway:I think he's been a net good for the world. Inspired the EV race. The space, I mean, seeing that rocket, that booster rocket captured on it as it's falling, that's just inspiring. But at the same time, the problem with the word a net good for society is the word net. I also think he should be held accountable for his coarseness and his cruelty. to you. I don't think you attain that level of power such that you cannot pay people their legally obligated severance. I don't think you accuse an employee of being a sex criminal such that that employee has to move their house. I think he's not a very good role model for men.

1:32:27Scott Galloway:I don't think living alone with none of your 12 children by three women with a loaded gun next to your bed is what men should aspire to. So I think it's just sort of a Greek tragedy. I think he's going to move the world forward. But I think, quite frankly, being coarse and cruel and super into ketamine, I don't think that's something young men should aspire to. So should he be recognized for his achievements? Yes. Should he also be held accountable? And should we be critical of him on the things that where I don't think he's living up to his blessings? Yeah. And so, but look, I don't think he thinks a lot about me, nor should he.

1:33:06Scott Galloway:But I don't, you know, I like the more generally the people are most patriotic are the ones who've invested most in our nation and that's veterans they're the most patriotic the thing I find so distressed distressing about guys like Elon Musk and generally what I'll call this tech bro community is I think they're the most blessed Americans there's we're the most blessed people on the planet because if you look at a map if you go up the western coast you start at San Diego Qualcomm, and you go up to LA, you get SpaceX and Snap, and you keep going north, you get Salesforce and Meta and Alphabet.

1:33:46Scott Galloway:You keep going north, you get Amazon and OpenAI and Microsoft, and then it stops when you hit the Canadian border. Lululemon, maybe, in Vancouver. And then you go down to San Diego, and it stops, and you got to go another 5 ,000 kilometers until you get to Mercado Libre. Maybe there's something about being in America that has really helped you. And I find these are the first people to shitpost America. So it's like, boss, you don't realize a lot of your success is not your fault. It's the success of other Americans. Every one of these companies is built on a technology that was funded by American middle class taxpayers, whether it was DARPA, whether Elon Musk got$350 million tax-free loan.

1:34:29Scott Galloway:He hates subsidies, but he was there for it when we gave him a low interest$350 million. Their charging stations are being built out by taxpayers. DARPA, the internet, Netflix was built on net neutrality funded by California and the other 49 states, taxpayers. And yet they seem to just dislike America once they have leveraged the shit out of it. And I just find it obnoxious. I think that's a good pushback. My husband is a contractor still for the Defense Innovation Unit at the Department of Defense in their AI portfolio and runs the commercial portion. and a lot of what you talk about of us versus China, which is real, not like us versus the Chinese, but the actual Chinese government, only happens because the government is willing to fund a bunch of initiatives in Silicon Valley and in venture capital that venture capitalists would not.

1:35:19Scott Galloway:No way, they wouldn't get near it. They wouldn't get near it. And you and I both know a lot of people who are full-time venture capitalists. I want to come back in my next life as one because I don't think the real hard work is being the founders. doing the ridiculously hard masochistic thing that is building a business out of nothing. And I also think, you know, being a government worker when you have to go to war at a foreign land, which is our soldiers. So I agree with you. All right. This is incredible. Thank you for being here today. This was so interesting. I learned a ton. And I know that everybody probably knows where to find you.

1:35:56But if I haven't said it before, no mercy, no malice. Probably my favorite newsletter.

1:35:59Scott Galloway:Oh, thank you. Yeah. Incredible newsletter overall. And I listened to Adrift in probably like three days on audiobook. And then I bought actually the real book too, because the graphics are so incredible. And I think even if people don't read books today, which is more normal, being able to understand the world through those graphs is very easy and digestible. So if you haven't read Scott's new book, Adrift, it's really good, as are all the rest. Thank you so much for being on this podcast. Thank you. And congrats on your success. Yeah, well, we'll see how long it lasts. all right guys I think that's a wrap good thanks everybody