Scott Galloway on Intergenerational Theft and Why Stoicism is Important for Young Men

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1:04Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

1:55Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I was reading this article in The Atlantic about Austin, where it seems like everyone's moving these days. I was sort of lamenting. It wasn't a positive article for the most part, but it was like, you know, you can see all these heterodox thinkers everywhere in Austin. It's like listing all the people that you might see in Austin. It's like, you can go to a party and see Ryan Holiday. And I was like, no, you can't because I don't do anything. I never go out. And I don't really live in Austin. So I definitely don't go out in Austin.

2:27But I actually, I went to a little reception at Daniel Libitsky's house. He's the founder of Kind Bars. He was on the podcast actually a while ago. I'll link to that episode. He's a really nice guy. It's funny. I got there and his son was there, a 16-year-old son who reads the Daily Stoic every day. So it's cool. He's been a nice supporter and friend And ever since I've gotten to know him. But anyways, the reception was with Governor Westmore. And I walked in and usually I'm sort of, where do I go? What do I do? You know, I'm not the most socially adept at these things. But Governor Moore, whose books I've read, his staff was like, oh, my God, you're on holiday.

3:07We have to take you to meet the governor. So that was really cool. I was excited. And we were talking to him and some people on his staff about how young men are neglected these days and certain kind of like grifter charlatans, like bad influences are making their way to those people because that audience is so underserved. That's why I take the stoicism stuff very seriously. And I won't just take it where the algorithm wants. I really do want to talk about the virtue ideas. This is what I was talking about in the afterward of Right Thing right now. As I was talking about them, I was like, you know, who do you think is like doing a good job of this stuff?

3:48And one of them mentioned Professor Scott Galloway. And I said, you know, I totally agree. And the reason that's funny that you said that is I just left my office where I had finished recording this today's episode, this podcast with Scott Galloway. He lives in London, so we're doing it remote. He and I have known each other for a number of years. We have the same publisher. I believe we have the same editor at Portfolio. But we've never met in person. But we're both mutual fans of each other's work. We go back and forth every once in a while. And I always like his stuff. And he's been talking a lot about some really important ideas, which we opened the episode with.

4:24The other thing we talked about that Scott talks a lot about, he has a new edition of his book, The Algebra of Wealth, A Simple Formula for Financial Security. He also has one called The Algebra of Happiness. I would say those two things are related, right? The purpose of wealth is to facilitate happiness. And if you're not happy, it doesn't really matter how wealthy you are, which is something we talk about in the Daily Stoic Wealth course. We look at an expansive definition of wealth, not just financial acumen and skills, but like how you build a wealthy life. So I'll link to that in today's show notes.

4:56Also, you can get that for free if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life. But if you haven't listened to Scott's podcast, read his articles, he has this killer TED talk that blew up earlier this year, mostly about what he calls intergenerational theft, the way that young people are not setting future generations up for success here. That's something I've talked a lot about. And then he's been talking a lot about meaningful relationships, the importance of embracing your emotions and the dangers of toxic masculinity. So it's funny, he's a big fan of stoicism. So for us to be able to talk about stoicism and emotions, that maybe seems like a contradiction to people, but it shouldn't be.

5:31I think this is a really awesome episode. Thanks to Governor Moore for having me come out. I think it would be awesome to hear him and Scott talk. Hopefully I'll get to see the governor next time I'm in Maryland to speak at the Naval Academy. His office is basically right across the street there in Annapolis. You can check out Scott's books and podcasts in the show notes. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter. I refuse to call it X. He's at Prof Galloway. I'll link to the previous episode of him on the podcast and I'll link to both my episodes on his podcast. I think both of those are worth listening to as well.

6:05Thanks Scott for coming on. Enjoy.

6:12So I wanted to start with this thing you've been talking about. I think you called it the intergenerational theft, but it strikes me there's kind of a bunch of intersecting trends. So like boomers are getting older, not getting out of the way. We've got stuff like nimbyism that makes it harder to build, harder for young people to afford things. And then we've also got some interesting trends, I think, specifically with young men who seem to be struggling in school, struggling to find their place in the world. So you kind of have all this intersecting dark stuff that makes it hard to be a young person, but specifically hard to be a young man in today's world.

6:52And then it strikes me that sort of what steps in to fill that void are like grifters, bad influences, people who want to sort of exploit and direct that very real frustration, but maybe not with the mind to help those people actually get better. First of all, it's great to be with you, Ryan. I'm really enjoying watching your kind of like meteor or a grise. I've known you for that long, but I've known you for long enough to see the kind of, I feel like I'm watching my 16-year-old go from like 5 '2 to 5 '10. It's just, I love how much recognition you're getting. I appreciate it. So you said a lot there.

7:37So let's start with, for the first time, I think the epicenter or ground zero for many of the problems, our biggest problems are what ails us. Polarization, depression, anxiety is the following stat. And that is for the first time in our nation's nearly three century history, a 30-year-old male or female isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at the age of 30. Because if you think about what is the core social impact, well, you'll protect the shores, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. But how does that really distill down a ground level situation at home. And I think that it's the following.

8:15It's that if we play by the rules and our kids are good kids, they're going to have a better life than us. That's kind of this natural assumption we always made. I don't know about you. I have an exponentially better life than my parents, economically, emotionally, everything. Sure. And when the majority of kids aren't doing as well as their parents, and many of them are still living at home, it creates this blanket of rage and shame across millions of households. And then if you think about, okay, let's talk more tactically, what is sort of the American dream? Own your first home. It signals your worth as a mate.

8:51You start nesting. It's a source of pride. It's forced savings to build some economic prosperity or future. All right. Housing has gone up faster than inflation for the last 30 years. And it's a function of the nimbyism you talked about. Housing permits used to be a function of elected officials, now it's become a function of citizens. And unfortunately, those citizens have a vested interest in reducing the number of housing permits. Because if I can reduce the number of housing permits in my neighborhood, and I already own a house, the value of my house goes up. And so we have millions of fewer homes being constructed than is required for household formation and to keep housing at a reasonable cost.

9:32So that has become the American dream of homeownership has become a bit of a hallucination. Well, what's the other kind of on-ramp into the middle class or the upper middle class? Traditionally, it's been higher education. And me and my colleagues have become the new enforcers of the caste system. We have become so drunk on luxury. And there's a myth that we are noble people or more noble than your average person. And that's just not true. We want to have nice cars and homes in the Hamptons like everybody else. And we have found this strategy for increasing our compensation and reducing our accountability.

10:07And I call it the LVMH strategy. And that's, all right, I sit on an endowment that is the GDP of Costa Rica, but I'm only going to let in 1 ,500 people a year. My endowment has gone up 4 ,000%, 40-fold, as it has at Harvard over the last 30 years, I think. But I'm only going to increase enrollments by 4%. Harvard could let in 15 ,000 kids, not 1 ,500, and not sacrifice any quality at all. Or even charge tuition. Yeah. The thing about those top schools is if you don't have the money, they have so much money that they'll actually figure out a way to give you the financial aid. But what is really upsetting is they say, well, they advertise we're the most diverse class in history.

10:48And it's true, 51 % of Harvard's freshman class is non-white, but the problem is 70 % of those folks come from upper income dual parent homes. So all we're doing is reshuffling the elites. So we shouldn't be talking about who gets in. We should be talking about how many. We should be talking about how many houses are built. And then you layer on top of that, drilling down to specifically the group that has fallen further faster than any group in history. It's young men in America. And the stats are four times more likely to kill themselves. You're in a morgue, five young people died by suicide.

11:24Four of them are men. And if any other group, if you had five people and four of them were from any other special interest group, it would be Houston, we have a problem and we'd be talking about programs and investments. But because of the privilege I enjoyed and my father enjoyed, there's a certain amount of resentment and a lack of empathy for young men, especially young white men. There's a feeling that they had their time in the sun and they just, you hear words like accountability or pull yourself by your bootstraps, or if you were just more in touch with your emotions. And the challenges facing young men who are biologically less mature, many of the jobs and the trades have gone away.

12:04You know, where's wood shop, auto shop, and metal shop gone? So you have this very real stresses and strains among young people, especially among young men, and they don't see anyone's doing anything about it. And the one place that seems to be empathizing, or if you will, seeing them is what I'll loosely call the manosphere. And it starts off, to be fair, really positive, be strong, be physically fit, take control of your life, get a plan to make money. But 80, 90 % of the time, not all at the time, but most of the time it ends up in just sign up for my class on how to trade crypto, where they start talking about women, like you should never let your woman go out to a club alone.

12:46Or it goes to this sort of J.D. Vance, women should be in the home. And it becomes thinly veiled misogyny. And so what I have argued, thinking about the upcoming election, what's interesting is that we thought it was going to be a referendum on women's rights. I think the election is going to be decided by masculinity. What do I mean by that? The voters that are up for grabs right now are not young women. They're going Harris. It's not old people, old men. They're going Trump. Young men aren't really going towards the Republican Party as a lot of people would say are the manosphere. Young men actually are supportive of gender rights as any demographic.

13:29What they're doing is they're moving away from the Democratic Party because they don't feel seen. And I'll wrap this up here, but on the DNC site, there's an explicit section that says who we serve. And it lists 16 different demographic groups from people of faith to immigrants to Asians, Pacific Islanders, Blacks, women, disabled, veterans. I tried to calculate it. And my best estimate is it covers 76 % of the population. And they're favoring, if you will, they have the same issue that universities have or the DEI apparatus has at universities. And that is when you are explicitly advocating and favoring 76 % of the population, you're not advocating for them.

14:09You're discriminating against the 24%. Right. So unfortunately, these individuals feel shunned by what I'll call more progressive or the establishment. And they're very drawn to anyone who sort of feels their pain. And unfortunately, that void has been filled by some very negative voices. But young people have it, in my opinion, are basically paying the price for a set of fiscal policies that have slowly but surely transferred wealth from the young to the old. Yeah, stoicism is an interesting sort of philosophy in this mix because it's kind of exactly what you would want a disaffected young man or young person to focus on.

14:50And yet it's also ripe for sort of wrenching out of context. I see it sort of be used as kind of a feeder system to some of these personalities, right? And it's been some of the people have called it broicism, but it's really interesting to me to watch watch sort of stoicism make its way, you know, sort of online. Because, yeah, when you have young men, it feels like stoicism is popular in the decline and fall of Rome. Right. It's a philosophy that that sort of you can turn to in times of chaos or dysfunction or despair. error. And yet it's not supposed to make you a sociopath. It's not supposed to make you a better sociopath.

15:33You know, that's not the point. Yeah. It feels like stoicism would be a great, a great sort of philosophy or zeitgeist or way of life to fill that void because it basically says, control your emotions, focus on what you can control. So I think that's why so many young men are really turned on to your content is it's a more positive way of channeling their frustration and looking for a guidepost in a nation that's becoming less reliant on a super being or churches, which is what happens to nations as they become wealthier. And they're told that masculinity is not the right framework for something.

16:08What do they turn to? If they can't turn to church, a lot of them are single parent homes. They don't have a male role model. Where do they turn? But more generally, and not to fall into identity politics and just focus on young men solely, let's use a very specific example. COVID, the response to COVID was a$6 trillion stimulus plan. We pumped$6 trillion into the economy. And 85 % of it wasn't spent. It wasn't spent on housing or healthcare or transportation to get to their job. It was put into a savings account or a Robinhood account. So 85 % of it went into the markets. So what happened? Housing went from the average price of a house went from$290 ,000 to$420 ,000 during the pandemic, and it hasn't come down.

16:49Stock markets have hit all-time highs. And the myth my generation tries to foment and place on your generation is that market highs are good for everybody. No, they're not. There's two times in your life. There's an investing time and there's a harvesting time. You're in an investing time. You're trying to live below your means, make good money, establish competence, be focused, show discipline, show stoicism, realize no one's thinking about your stuff as much as you are, save money, deploy an army of capital, and buy assets. You're in the investing part of your lifestyle. When you get to my age and you're thinking, I want to start enjoying life.

17:23I want to order the good wine. I'm starting to sell stuff. I'm starting to harvest. Markets at all time, abnormal highs. And by the markets, the average P of the market is usually 15 to 18. It's 25 now. Housing has never been higher as a percentage of GDP. That's great if you're my age and you own assets, but it's terrible for entrance. When you bail out the baby boomer owner of a restaurant during COVID, all you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 26-year-old graduate of a culinary academy that wants her shot and wants to be able to come in and buy a restaurant for pennies on the dollar.

17:59The reason I'm economically secure is that when I was your age and the Great Recession hit, they let the economy fall. They bailed out the banks, but they didn't bail out the economy. They spent$700 billion, not$7 trillion. And I got to buy Apple, Netflix, and Amazon at$8,$10, and$12 a share. And now those stocks are at$180, like$300, and$600. So disruption and churn are key to young people getting ahead and getting their own economic security. But what we've decided, or what old people have figured out, is that they can not only vote themselves more money, they can put in place insurance policies.

18:33When one of those exogenous events happens, it might create churn and opportunity for a younger generation. we take out your credit card and we deficit spend to ensure I stay rich. People call them entitled. In my view, they're entitled to be enraged. I'm in the party, you know, I'm in the club with champagne and cocaine and the closest your generation gets is you can throw your credit card in and I'm going to order another bottle. Yeah, it's easy to rail against sort of the Fox news hater of socialism as they're sitting on the couch watching it with a, you know, an 80, 90 % pension that won't exist for future generations, right?

19:13Like you can create sort of security or stability that you're the last one to get. And I think that's where a lot of the anger from young people comes from is they look in a future that sort of objectively, like you said, you know, not as rosy as their parents, but also just, you know, like I don't wake up and think I'll get social security someday. I think we all kind of see the writing on the wall that a lot of these programs are, have been run very hot for the benefit of people a few places in line ahead of us and will likely be out when it's our turn.

20:01Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Basko County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

20:46We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you.

21:25Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

22:09My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. and on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

22:46Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

23:06The numbers are staggering. The average 70-year-old today in America is 72 % wealthier than the average 70-year-old was 40 years ago. The average person under the age of 40 is 24 % less wealthy. Is that a healthy society? If the$40 trillion expanded child tax credit, which by the way, can reduce child poverty by almost up to a half overnight, gets ripped out of the infrastructure bill. But the$120 billion annual increase in the cost of living adjustment upward for social security flies right through. I mean, if you have the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet, boomers and seniors, and then you have a younger generation that's poorer than they've been, but one generation is transferring one and a half trillion dollars to the wealthiest.

23:49Does that make sense? And I'm not suggesting we do away with social security because there's a lot of boomers that quite frankly, just aren't prepared for retirement and don't have much money. But I know you make good money. I make good money. Should we be eligible for social security? Right. So there's this myth that the middle class is a naturally occurring organism, that if you just let the market take over, it'll happen on its own. It's not. It never has been. As a matter of fact, the greatest innovation in history, I would argue, it's not the iPhone or the semiconductor AI. It's the middle class.

24:16And it required a massive investment, the GI Bill, the National Highway Act, which was exceptionally expensive at the time. We expanded to college seats. We created a huge class of 7 million returning servicemen that quite frankly were attractive to women because they were economically viable, which created these secure, loving households to raise people who wanted civil rights, who wanted to bring women into the workforce. And this middle class, if it doesn't, if you don't, let me use the R word, if you don't redistribute wealth into the middle class, it's not a naturally occurring substance.

24:51in most economies, a small group of very talented, very hardworking, and very lucky people ascend to the top. They get to know their Congress. They get to know their leaders. They give them money. They basically weaponize government, and they further entrench and expand their wealth. And at some point, the bottom 99 get fed up and show up with torches. And it's happened everywhere. At some point, it'll happen here. It feels like Silicon Valley itself has kind of become in recent years, a microcosm of that very same phenomenon where you have a thing that started somewhat idealistically. It was obviously incredibly capitalistic.

25:33It was always about growth and success and scale and winning. And yet it was tempered by ideology. Google has the don't be evil mantra. The employees are treated incredibly well. It's fascinating to me to watch the evolution. Again, I see it kind of as a microcosm that we can all learn from. There's that expression. I remember hearing it as a kid. It says like, if you're not liberal when you're young, you have no heart. And if you're not conservative when you're older, you have no brain. But I've always seen that as one of the saddest things you could say about a person, the idea that as you become older and more successful, that your heart hardens and you become more self-interested and less compassionate and empathetic and principled.

26:23And I think it's kind of been fascinating to watch. And again, I'm speaking more here as a narrative as opposed to, you know, objective facts, but it's been fascinating to watch Silicon Valley as a whole and then certain personalities in Silicon Valley sort of embody that exact evolution or transition. You watch someone go from somewhat successful to extraordinarily successful and then sort of lose their moral compass, their empathy, their compassion, their commitment to anyone else other than themselves going along with it. And it feels like that's part of America's journey also, or that they've, America and Silicon Valley have gone on similar rides in the last decade or so.

27:06So Ryan, I think America becomes more like itself every day. And that is, it's a loving, generous place if you have money. And it's a rapacious, fine place if you don't. The gap between my dad and his CEO was big, but they all kind of lived near each other. My dad drove a Gran Torino. His boss drove a Cadillac. I mean, now the difference between the middle class and the wealthy, different healthcare, different selection set of mates, power and influence. I mean, it's just the idolatry of the dollar, the empower, the financialization of everything creates tremendous incentive to try and get rich or die trying.

27:46And also we have this lottery ticket mentality where when I applied to UCLA, the acceptance rate was 76%. It's now nine, but we're all under the delusion that our kids are one of the 9%. Yeah. So we're not as focused on trying to keep the drawbridge down, if you will. Well, tech itself has become what I'd call this Hunger Games economy, where a small group of people and companies make such extraordinary amount of money and they live such incredible lives. And the rest kind of die an uncomfortable, slow, drawn out death. And what's most disappointing, there's a bit of a cartoon about Silicon Valley because the majority of people are still Democrats.

28:24And I think I would argue pretty decent, good people. But some of the most outspoken people are the first to kind of shitpost America after what I would call benefiting more from it than anyone in history. If you look up and down the West Coast of North America, you have these trillion-dollar market cap companies or multi-hundred-billion-dollar companies from San Diego and Qualcomm to Snap to SpaceX to Salesforce, keep going north, Amazon, Microsoft. And you get to the Canadian border, and it stops until you get to Lululemon. And you get to the south, San Diego, it stops until you go another 5 ,000 kilometers to Mercado Libre in Argentina.

29:04Okay, there's clearly something going on in America that is more than just how awesome you are. And the fact that our most loyal Americans are those who've invested the most, and that is our veterans. I believe our most disloyal Americans are the first ones to criticize America and talk about how this sort of techno-libertarian philosophy, which as far as I can tell is I just don't want to pay taxes and be accountable for anything I say or do on my platform. It is so incredibly disappointing because it's hard to point to a group of individuals who are more blessed and have benefited more from America.

29:39In addition, some of it is our fault, and that is we have not elected people who will protect the long-term commonwealth with the type of tax structure that we've always had that is progressive. So corporate taxes are at their lowest rate since 1939. 39. I think Facebook is going to pay or Met is going to pay about a 12 or 16 % tax rate. The 25 wealthiest Americans will pay an average tax rate of six to 8%. So they have been so effective at weaponizing the tax code, basically buying our elections with Citizen United, where money is now basically more important than the votes themselves because money can buy votes, that you have essentially this superclass of billionaires and of companies.

30:21And the problem is Americans put up with it because we all think we're going to be that company or that person. Yeah. Rather than – I can prove to each of us mathematically 99 % of our children are not in the top 1%. So what I often say, my observation around my kids, I've taught 4 ,500 kids when I say kids students from 2002 to today. It's never been easier to be a billionaire. In my class of 350 kids, there's going to be a billionaire, either through alternative investments or technology. But it's never been harder to be a millionaire. almost all of us, when I got out of business school in 92, none of us were going to be billionaires, but almost all of us were going to make a good living.

30:57And now I'm convinced a non-zero percentage of my class will be on government assistance, struggle with mental health, be living with their parents, not be able to find a mate. So it's become a bit of a Hunger Games economy. And it comes down to this fundamental question, what kind of world do we want to live in? Is our job as academics and as leaders and as business people, do we want to identify a superclass of freakishly remarkable kids or the kids of rich people and turn them into billionaires? Or do we want to give the bottom 90 a chance of being in the top 10? That's what America used to be.

31:29And so I think we've sort of lost the script and technology sort of embodies this change of the narrative where it's all about being freakishly remarkable and a lack of gratitude towards the nation, that the nation is a bug, not a feature. Yeah. And I don't think it's it's not good for the individual to be a billionaire. You know, put aside the the the economic necessity, reality, inevitability of it. I think it's fascinating. I'm sure you've met a lot of very wealthy people in your time. I have not met that many that I think I'd actually want to trade places with. There are things they have that I would like.

32:08There are things I have that I that they have that I might think I might be able to use better or would be cool or whatever. But oftentimes, the real bug is inside that person. They have some almost tragic flaw that makes them profoundly successful, again, putting aside some of the luck and the economic conditions that makes it impossible for them to ever have any semblance of enough. So I know a lot of billionaires, and I would say there's a bit of a cartoon that they're bad people, that it's Monty Burns with a nuclear power plant. I generally have found that billionaires on the whole, and it's not a popular thing to say, are good, high-character people.

32:47And one of the reasons they're billionaires is because along the way, they've collected allies. And what I advise young people is if you want to be really wealthy or successful, you need to put yourself in a room of opportunities. And the way you do that is by creating a bunch of allies, by being kind and generous with your time and your thoughts and your emotions as a young person and invest in a ton of relationships such that people think of you. There was a study at Google that when they have an open job, they put out a job opening on LinkedIn. Within 24 hours, they get 200 CVs. They choose the 20 best.

33:15And 80 % of the time, the one person hired had an internal advocate and friend. So if you want to be successful, make a lot of friends, be a good person, be someone that people want to help. But what I decided, going back to your notion around, I'm a big fan of Daniel Kahneman. And the bad news is that money can buy happiness. There's a myth that it can't. It's not true. Middle-income people are happier than lower-income. Upper-income people are happier than middle-income. But the good news is it tops out at a certain point. And I've tried to live this. Part of my journey around writing the book and coaching young people around financial literacy is being very transparent about my assets.

33:50Most people have a number. And I actually think it's a good thing to have a number because you want to kind of at some point estimate how much money do I need to live each year? What would be the passive income? Rich is the shit you own. Wealth is being able to do whatever you want. So if you want to be wealthy, how much money do you need in a year to live okay? So you think, I need$100 ,000 a year to live the way I want to live when I'm older. My kids will be gone. I'm going to downsize, whatever. Times it by 20 or 25. All right, I need two or two and a half million. That's my number. I came up with my number, and my number kept getting bigger as I got older, as it does.

34:22At one point, I thought if I ever had a million bucks, I'd be done. Then I was like, okay, I need 10 million. My number got much bigger. But in 2017, when I sold my last company, I hit my number. And for about six months, I started putting together the team and the deck and I thought, I'm going to start a private equity fund. I have the contacts. I'm in the sweet spot in terms of skillset, the economy. I'll put 50 million bucks of my own money in this fund. Why? Because I want to be a baller and I want to be a billionaire. Scott Galloway billionaire sounded really cool to me. I like the sound of that.

34:53And what I was doing was I was continuing on this hamster wheel that I was having trouble getting off of because my whole life I grew up economically stressed. I just thought the bigger the number, the happier and the less stress I'll have. And to be honest, that was true up until that point. But I thought, okay, what's the difference between what I have now and a billion dollars? Not much of anything. I could give more money away, maybe have more political influence, but it would also come at a pretty big cost. It would be a lot of additional stress. So I decided that from this point forward, and this is 2017, every year I sit down with my, with Goldman who manages my money.

35:29I say, what am I worth? And anything above that number, I either spend, I'm, I am not a, I love the accoutrements of a capitalist economy. I go on crazy vacations. I have a plane. I don't deny myself of anything. I love spending money. I'm spending money like a fifties gangster just diagnosed with ass cancer and I'm loving it. Anything above that, I give away. And I don't do it. I'd like to think I'm a good person, but I do it because I enjoy it. I like, you know, the difference between an opinion and a principle is I talk a lot about stuff I'm concerned about. Well, okay, at some point, my actions and my money have to foot to all I'm saying.

36:11So I'm giving away a lot of money. And I can tell you it feels amazing. And a virus that infects America is that people hoard. There is no reason to be a billionaire. I'm not suggesting we Robin hood them and take their money away. You are not going to get any happier. I'm convinced that there's a greater chance it'll fuck up your kids and do anything good for them. And you become such a slave to money. You also become a target, quite frankly, and a bit of a society that's starting to get very upset about income inequality. You know, people love to tear down billionaires. I don't know. You're not going to be any happier, but I can guarantee you is that one, spending money is a ton of fun and giving money away is a ton of fun.

36:51So what I'm trying to espouse or advocate for is once you have a number, but once you hit it above it, enjoy it and give it away. There's no reason to get above that certain amount. And when some people have 50, 100,$200 billion, there's just no getting around it. That creates a system where there are too many people that don't have enough money. And the incremental utility or happiness in making$50 ,000 versus$30 ,000 is enormous. The difference between anything above$10 million a year is nominal if non-existent, which says to me, why wouldn't we have or restore a much more progressive tax structure above, say, $10 million a year?

37:33You're not going to lose it. These people aren't going to lose anything. They're not going to be any less happier. But to have the ability to expand the earned income child tax credit to have more vocational programming, more free junior college, that'll create a ton of happiness across our nation. So I've become a little bit more, socialist is the wrong term, but I believe we need to restore a much more progressive tax structure at much higher income limits. And I'm trying, I've tried to inoculate myself from what I felt I was engaging in, and that is hoarding. Yeah, it's probably getting a bit in the weeds from a policy perspective, but it is totally insane to have a tax system where making$400 ,000 is taxed at the same number as making$400 million.

38:16Oh no, it's higher. Right. Higher. For the$400 ,000. What do you mean? You make$400 ,000, you live in San Francisco, you're probably paying 40 % to 45 % tax rate. If you make a million or 2 million, you're probably paying 48 % or 50%. But once you make the jump to light speed, I started a company called L2. When I sold it, I sold it for$160 million. The first$10 million was tax-free. Right. Yes. If you're at a point, you're killing it. I know you're killing it. You can start deploying an army of capital. Yes. You can hold on to your stocks. They can grow tax-free. You live in Texas, zero taxes, and you pay 22.8 % instead of the people who work for you.

38:55Their current income is taxed at the highest tax rate of 37%. So above kind of a million, two million bucks, your tax rate actually goes down. Yeah, I wasn't even getting into capital gains. I'm just saying like if you're in some scenario where you're making a million dollars a year and$40 million a year because you play in the NBA, the idea that those are taxed the same is insane. It makes no sense. But I do think it's fascinating to watch what money does to a person. And there's a story about an ancient Stoic who there's this sort of obnoxious man in town and he gives him this grant of money.

39:32And the people say, you know, why would you do that? He says money is exactly what this guy deserves. The point was it would bring the person to ruin. And there's something like power where money, it doesn't corrupt so much as it reveals. Right. So if you're a good person and I agree, I've met a lot of wonderful, very wealthy people. If you're a good person, that money can allow you to just be more of what you are. If you're a person who was trying to prove something, if you were motivated by grievance or anger or some inherent insecurity or not enoughness, succeeding and getting what you thought you wanted is actually just going to pour fuel on all those negative traits inside you.

40:18So it's fascinating to watch what money reveals about people. Well, I want to flip it here. What do you think? You're in the top 0.1 % in terms of success for people your age, maybe 0.01%. What is the fire? What has motivated you? Yeah, I think early on, like a lot of people, you want to send a message. You want to make your dad proud of you. You want to do these things. And then you get that and you realize, actually, you're never going to get that, that you're never going to get anything with external stuff. I think what's been fascinating for me is the more I've come to love what I do, which is writing, the more the numbers attached to what they will compensate you for doing that, the more absurd they become.

41:09So it's kind of been almost a dissociating, disorienting thing where, you know, my dream was to be able to write and you hope someday, one day they'll let you do it. And then you succeed at it. And now they're not only letting you do it, but they throw extremely large amounts of money at you. And I almost don't know how to make heads or tails of it. I don't know exactly what to do. No one feels sorry for you right now. I don't expect them to. You're probably one of the 50 best-selling authors right now in the world or maybe one of the top 10. So everyone, it's really interesting to really try and in a raw way, distinct to what the Hallmark Channel is telling you to say, think about what really motivated me or motivates me.

41:55And for me, it was women. My mom got very sick when I was young and I couldn't take care of her. And I came into a situation. I was in graduate school. I came back. She had cancer. She had shitty insurance. We were underinsured. She was a secretary. She got discharged from the hospital early. And I came into just like an ugly situation. I didn't have the capacity or the emotional resilience to handle at that point. And I felt so emasculated that I couldn't take care of my mother. And I thought I need to get money. And also on the flip side, I also noticed very early that towards my senior year in college, women started gravitating towards the guys whose parents had a house in Palm Springs or Aspen.

42:36And I thought, I would like to punch above my weight class romantically. I would like to find romantic partners that are higher character, better looking and nicer than me. And that all led to money. And that it's disparaging for women. I have a ton of evidence to show that is entirely true. And so I wasn't trying to change the world, save the dolphins, be a better person. I wanted economic security from a young age. I'm like, that's it. That was my scorecard. And the hard part with that is that it's very hard or difficult to put the scorecard down because the thing about numbers is you can always imagine a bigger number.

43:11But I think it's important to on a regular basis say, what really drives me? And am I there? I could take care of my mom. I'm in a loving relationship with someone who most of my friends would agree is more impressive than me. So now what? And what you've discovered much earlier than I did, I love to write, you love to write. We're both good at it. I wish I'd started at your age. I wrote my first book at 2015. I wrote my first book at the age of 50. And I wish I'd started at the age of 25. I had a really weird experience with that, where money sort of intersects with it. Because at the beginning of my career, and this is how I got to a place of financial security and also could write about something as seemingly unlucrative as an ancient school of philosophy.

43:59You know, I was in a position to take not very much money for my first book on on stoicism because I had a decent career ghostwriting. I worked on a lot of other people's books. You were Robert Greene's ghostwriter, right? No, no, not his ghostwriter. I was his research assistant. He is an amazing writer who doesn't need any help. But I've worked on a lot of other people's books. And so I had this surreal experience of being summoned to meet a lot of very successful, important people. And then you'd also hear stories where, you know, you'd meet these billionaires or, you know, extremely successful athletes or entrepreneurs or whatever.

44:35What do they want to do? They want to have a book. Like more than anything, they want to have a book. I was like, but I want what you have. I want to be rich, you know, like like everyone does. And you realize, OK, this person has everything you think you'd want in the world. And they want to trade it to have this thing that I get to do as my actual job. I always love that in the first season of Yellowstone, Kevin Costner is talking to his son and he says, you know, we have to remember that if you had all the money in the world, you would use it to buy this. And he's like talking about their ranch.

45:06And it can be very interesting when you watch what people do with their money. It's usually things that are not as expensive as one might think. And so I realized, hey, I'm a professional writer and people who have all the money in the world would want to trade places with me. So I want to make sure that I keep doing this and I don't try to trade what I have to get what they have. And like I've been saying this recently, like to me, being rich is spending time with your kids. Like that's a form of wealth to be able to spend a lot of time with your family. Well, that can be a very expensive thing or it can be a very cheap thing.

45:46You know, living in a place you actually like, that can be very cheap or very expensive. And so kind of thinking about what are the things that are very expensive in ways other than money and optimizing your life around those things. having a job that you like, living a place that you like, being with someone you like. These are all things that many rich people have failed to acquire with all the money in the world. And when you sort of realize that, it can give you some clarity about what to chase and what not to chase.

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48:26Well, we were talking about billionaires. I know a decent number of billionaires who are very overweight or suffer from a health ailment. Yeah. I don't think they'd trade their wealth for a book, but they would trade their wealth for health. Sure. If a billionaire, if you had a billion dollars, but you had a sore throat, and it was just never going to go away. And every time you swallowed, you had a sore throat. You'd at some point decide two, four, three months, six months. At some point you go, fine, take the billion bucks. I can't have a sore throat. And to have that kind of money and not be in reasonably good shape and people accuse you of fat shaming, I don't think wealthy people have any excuse not to be in good shape because they're going to hugely regret it.

49:03And at some point they'd be willing to trade it all to have more of their health back. The trade-offs are immense and you just have a sober conversation. So I think it's valuable to define what is wealth. Yes. And I see wealth as your passive income is greater than your burn. And what people tend to focus on, they think wealth is a function of how much money you make. It's not, it's how much money you spend or how much money you need to spend. So if you decide, I want to move to a suburb of St. Louis, coach Little League, I want to live to work, not work to live. I don't need to be a baller. Me and my partner work.

49:38We make 80, 100 ,000 bucks a year combined. We can have a nice life. We take two good vacations a year. We have a reasonable car. We have health insurance. And we spend a lot of time outdoors, hunting, playing sports, whatever it is. And by the time I'm 60, I'm going to have enough money that it'll spin off enough money. That's wealthy. It's a great life. I have a friend, a close friend who runs M &A for a bulge bracket investment bank that makes seven to 10 million bucks a year between his ex-wife, his alimony, his child support, his current kids, his home in the Hamptons, his master of the universe lifestyle, his NetJets card.

50:15He doesn't save a lot of money and there's no way he has enough money to create the passive income to support the lifestyle he has. He's poor. So what I say to people is, and the other example, my dad, who's 94, between his Royal Navy pension and social security, and he owns some laundry machines at some trailer parks where he goes every day with his healthcare worker to get the quarters. He's built that way. He makes$52 ,000 a year, but he spends$48 ,000 a year. My dad is Scottish. He's one of those guys, he will no joke, ask for a half drink frozen margarita to go from the one restaurant he goes to every Friday night.

50:51But he's rich. He's still saving money at the age of 94. And that gives him a certain amount of security. And for me, wealth and money are the following. Money is a means, but the ends are deep and meaningful relationships. That's the whole shooting match. And what money has meant for me is that if I go to Colorado, I can call a bunch of friends and say, come get me. I'll fly you out. I rented this ridiculously big, expensive house. I'm wasting, I'm just spending a shit ton of money on experiences. It also creates an absence of stress in my life so I can focus on relationships. If you look at divorce rates, if you look at blood pressure among young people, most Most of it can be reverse engineered to a lack of money or economic stress.

51:34So I think of, okay, the end game is deep and meaningful relationships. And all money does is take the stress out of those relationships or most of it. And then to the upside gives you the opportunity to do these amazing things with your kids and your spouse and for your friends. But to think that money itself is the objective and just getting more. No, that's just, you know, I think that's going to be deeply unsatisfying when you get to the end and realize, okay, I got a lot of money. Now what? Yeah, you can't take it with you. I want to talk about stoicism again for a second, because I think to go back to this crisis of men, I think when perhaps the reason that some people, you know, there is some sort of elite sneering at stoicism, you know, it's associated with toxic masculinity.

52:21It does seem to be like that people associate stoicism with a lack of emotions. I think not being I think there's a difference between being emotionless and being less emotional. But the idea that, you know, the way forward in life, that the key to success, that being a man is stuffing those emotions down and not having them. That strikes me as a as a dangerous thing to tell young people and also a dangerous way to live. So first off, I think the reason that your work resonates with people so much is not only because you're a compelling storyteller, but young men need guardrails. And the reason why I would assume your audience is predominantly male is that young men need guardrails.

53:05And fewer and fewer men have the guardrails of a relationship. Only one in three men under the age of 30 has a girlfriend. And it's interesting, two in three women under the age of 30 have a boyfriend because they're dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. They don't have religion as much. A lot of them don't have a male role model. We have the second most single parent homes in the world behind Sweden. one out of three men has no contact with their kids at six years post-divorce. So you have a lot of kind of men who are just sort of wandering and looking for a code.

53:35They're looking for guardrails. And I think stoicism, especially the way you present it in a very sort of optimistic, practical way, I think a lot of people are latching onto it because there's a void of what is a productive code or guardrails for me or an ideology that I can hold to that can help me make better decisions in my life. And I think that's why stoicism is resonating so much as it relates to emotions. From the age of 29 to 44, I didn't cry. I didn't cry when I got divorced. I didn't cry when my mother died. I just literally forgot how. I don't know if it was because some weird sense of masculine men don't cry.

54:08I don't know what it is, but I literally just forgot how to cry. And then I started crying again at 44. I learned how. And what I would say is it's one of the nicest things that's happened to me in the last 15 years, because when something really moves me, I saw, uh, Hirsch Goldberg Pollan's mother give that eulogy on him. And it was so beautiful. And I was thinking about, I was packing my son for boarding school, uh, on Monday and, you know, his feet are now size 10 and I see these new balance shoes and he's wearing too much cologne and he's got his first razor and he's bought this vintage Adidas sweatshirt that he's so proud of.

54:46And I'm just sitting there and I'm thinking about the loss, the grieving parents. And I have to excuse myself because I get very emotional. I go out of the room and I think, well, I need to go back into the room to show him that it's okay to cry. But what I tell men or young men is if something moves you, try and lean into it and learn how to cry because it's not what's important to you. Like I have figured out because of my willingness to cry, what I think really moves me. Also try to figure out a way to laugh out loud a lot. That is really rewarding. But if you think about the advantage we have as sentient beings, especially humans, we have a larger range of emotions.

55:25And so to not really lean into your emotions, happiness, sadness, grieving, joy, laughter, is to not take advantage of your blessings as this species. Yeah. And also you become smarter. You become better at what you do. Why am I so moved by this content? Well, understand it. Why do you think it's so powerful? Why is it moving you this way? And then learn from it. Why are you upset about this? Okay, this is what's important to you. This is what offends you. Otherwise, you're just sort of, as I was through 29 through 44, I was just kind of sleepwalking through life. I didn't really feel anything.

56:02So men really need to get over this bullshit notion of masculinity. is not showing your emotions. It is so important and all that. It's just so rewarding. Yeah. We only have a couple of stories about Marcus Aurelius, this human being, not the philosopher, but I think it's striking that almost all of them involve him crying, crying over victims of the plague, crying over the loss of one of his tutors. We even hear that he cries when he finds out he's going to be emperor because it strikes him as this utterly overwhelming, you know, impossible job. And it strikes me that, you know, when people talk about, you know, men don't show their emotions, you know, yet we know we see those men get angry all the time.

56:43So it's not that they don't have emotions. It's, it's that the only emotion they are in touch with is their temper or their anger or their frustration. And if there is any emotion to work on controlling, it's your anger. And then it's those other emotions, compassion and love. Those are the kinds of ones that you want to explore because those are enriching and they tell you something and they tell you, you know, what you probably need and want more of in your life. Yeah. I'm struggling with this because I'm writing a book on masculinity and I'm trying to figure out a way, just as you've used stoicism as a means of developing a code or guidepost for people.

57:20I'm wondering if masculinity or a more aspirational form of masculinity could also serve a similar type of guidepost for young men. Yeah. Because we're built differently. We have more testosterone. People born as men are more prone to certain types of activities and attributes than, and women are born to their own set of attributes, which isn't to say women can't demonstrate wonderful masculinity and men can't demonstrate wonderful femininity. But I think we need to stop demonizing masculinity and re-embrace it and develop a more kind of aspirational tone of it. And I do think there's something about masculinity where you have a code and you speak up for yourself and there is a line.

57:53I went to a football match and these guys were in our seats and wouldn't move. And I got very, very angry and upset and my son was freaked out. And I'm glad he saw it. It was like, okay, I'm, you know, I have a line and I get in people's faces. It doesn't happen very often, but it happens. And I thought, I'm actually glad that happened and that he saw that. At the same time, when someone cuts me off in traffic, when someone says something to me and is rude at a, you know, someone's rude to me on a plane or something in front of my boys, the person I was 20 years ago would have been like, I need to get back in their face.

58:28I need to restore harmony to the universe. No one gets the best of me. And I do think the real masculinity is that you're strong enough to kind of, on a regular basis, you take blows. It's okay. It's all right. You're going to be fine if someone gets the better of you every once in a while. You can take it. You're a man. You can absorb these blows. Yeah, that your ego is not so fragile that you cannot... It's ironic we talk about snowflakes, you know, sort of snowflakes being the people who can't deal with, you know, controversial or provocative ideas and, you know, the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

59:04And then there is this kind of snowflake-ism of like, I can't be insulted. Who are you to say that to me? Why am I not getting the respect that I deserve? When you have a strong sense of self, to me, part of stoicism is, is you become indifferent to what other people say and do around you because, you know, it doesn't affect or change what actually matters. The Stokes would say, you know, the only thing, the only way a person can harm you or the only way something harms you is if it harms your character. So if because someone does something to you and then you react in a way that is dishonest or mean or cruel or irrational, the harm that happened there was what you inflicted on yourself, not what they did to you.

59:50100%. I struggle with anger and depression. I hold grudges. It's awful. There's certain people who I think have wronged me and I plot my revenge. It's really pathetic. And this guy named Hamid Mogadam, who is a mentor of mine and was on my board. He's the CEO of this company called Prologis, this big read. Basically, this guy, and I like to call out names. I will only ship post people much more powerful than me, but I do ship post people. This guy named Mike Moritz is the most powerful venture capitalist in the world. He and I were on the same board together. He became chairman of my company. we couldn't stand each other.

1:00:22I thought he knew absolutely nothing about retail and had this enormous ego. He thought I was this immature, reckless entrepreneur. And over the course of the next several years working together, we would prove each other right. And every chance he got, he would try and say, the company needed more capital. He knew me and my co-founder didn't have any money and he'd wash us out. And he refused to participate in the next round unless we gave half our stack. He basically just fucked us every which way but loose because he could, and he was powerful. And I hated this guy. I mean, I hated him. And I raised a ton of money.

1:00:54I swept him off the board and I like came back in like the reconquering night. And nine months later, great financial recession happened and the company went chapter 11. And it was just like this devastating, emotional blow to me. And this guy, Hamid, took me to lunch and I'm like, you know, I was talking all about the company and how we got fucked and Mike and what a shitty person he is. And he said, do you really want to take revenge against this guy? And I'm like, yeah. And I kind of lean in close and he's like the best way to take revenge against anybody. If you really want to fuck with them, he's like, this is what you do.

1:01:28You'll lead an amazing life. You just lead an amazing life. You put them out of your head. And I try and think when someone gets me angry, I'm sure you get a lot of it. I got a lot of attacks online. It helps me to just, first of all, I click on the profile and I usually find out it's a bot and I'm convinced it's the CCP trying to undermine my credibility or an agent of Putin trying to, because I'm very pro-Ukraine. I'm paranoid, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong. But if it's an individual, I look at them and I immediately, like most of the time I go, look at my life. I'm healthy. I got healthy boys that love me immensely.

1:02:00I got economic security. I get to do shit like this with you. And immediately, I'm no longer angry. I'm like, and if someone powerful comes after me, I think that's it. I'm going to figure out a way to have a much better life than them. But that is my revenge. Well, Marcus Aurelius talks about that in meditations. He says the best revenge is to not be like that. So to not be like the person that did the thing to you. Because yeah, most of the time, even if that person is winning, they're not winning in the sense that you would like to trade places with them. Like it sucks to be them in some way.

1:02:33Not to say they're not rich, not to say they're not successful, not to say they're not talented, but you would not want to live inside their head or their life. Yeah, it's if you have economic security and people who love you unconditionally, not in that order. Yeah. You know, you're kind of 99. I mean, your job now is to try and make other people feel good, try to provide some of that prosperity to other people and occasionally take a hit and realize, you know, someone cuts you off in traffic. You don't know what just happened to that person that day. The guy at the ticket counter at Delta is rude to you or whatever.

1:03:09OK, look at her life. Look at yours. Do you think it's fun to work the counter at Delta? Probably not. It's not an easy job. Right. Yeah. To me, that's Mark's says the idea is to be free of the passions. So that's anger and rage and, you know, all these other other emotions. And he says, but full of love. That's what he learned from from one of his teachers. He said that's sort of the secret to life. And I think about, yeah, how can I get better at just going through the world and liking people, even the people I dislike, or feeling sympathy or compassion, even for the people I don't understand, even the people that are getting in my way, just to sort of be like, you won.

1:03:52does your day-to-day emotional state reflect the fact that you won? Or are you still in that kind of scarcity mindset, one up, one down, got to win, got to come out on top in every situation? That's not the attitude of a winner. That's the attitude of someone who's starving to death. Well, you hear these stories about Tom Cruise or Michael Jones, whoever it is, they're competitive, but Tom Cruise supposedly is happy to give up a line to a younger actor. He's like, you know, I'm getting 30 million bucks of film. Here, give him the line. Give her, you know, you want to be Tom Cruise, right? You want to be, okay, look at my life.

1:04:29I'm fine. I'm fine to, you know, pay it forward and give a little bit back, if you will. Yeah, I think like I wrote about this in the Justice book I just did. But like, to me, success, like as an athlete or as a coach is like, what does your coaching tree look like? Like, how many people have you helped be successful? So I imagine, you know, you're pretty proud of the companies you've built and, you know, the books that you've sold, but you're probably more proud of like what your students have gone on to do or what, you know, people who have messaged you and said, hey, your book changed my life.

1:05:01I trade, you know, I don't know exactly what the number is, but I'm much more interested in hearing from someone that said, hey, my book, your book helped me overcome X, Y, or Z than I am when my agent sends me a note that says, hey, you're back on the bestseller list this week. That means nothing to me. It doesn't even register at this point. But when someone says, hey, my wife and I were going to get a divorce and then we both read your book and now we've figured out a way to work it out. I go, that's worth a lot. Yeah, I think I want it all. I don't think I'm as involved as you. I think everybody has a certain amount of addiction in their life, whether they're addicted to online shopping or cocaine or porn or trans fats.

1:05:42I'm addicted to the affirmation of strangers. And it's really pathetic. And that is I read the comments on these platforms and I care what people say about me. And I want strangers to come up to me and love me. and I realized about 10 years ago, I was too focused on what people I didn't know thought of me and not focused enough on the people close to me, what they thought of me. Sure. And so I've tried to recalibrate some of my human capital, almost like an investment portfolio. I've done that. I've tried to focus much more on what the people in my inner circle think of me and invest more in them and be less concerned about what, you know, dog face three, three thinks of me on threads and also trying to, you know, reallocate, reallocate just some capital around how I allocate my time.

1:06:26I'm trying to be generous with everything, but my time. And I made my living my entire life. I tried to distill down to what is the value? I started consulting firms and strategy firms. Basically my living was garnered from establishing these proxy father-son relationships with CEOs or CMOs who would trust me. And basically my deal was I'm a smart person and I can help you become the CEO. And I'm going to write your presentations. I'm going to do your strategy. And in exchange for that, we're going to come up with reasons why you're going to spend a million dollars on my consulting firm. But it was basically this person trusted me immensely.

1:07:01It was like a father-son relationship. And now that I have economic security, what I've decided it is I'm no longer spending time with powerful people. I only spend time, not only, but I try to spend a lot more time with young people who aren't powerful. And it also makes me feel important to turn down lunches with the CEO of whatever, a ride hailing firm that thinks he's just fucking fascinating and then I want to hang out with him. So I'm trying to reallocate capital away from what I'll call, not even important, but successful older people, which was my entire living. I spent so much time at conferences and golf clubs trying to hang out with powerful people.

1:07:39And I'm like, okay, enough of that. I've done enough of that. Now I'm going to try and hang out. And it's also more fun. They're easier to help, right? I don't have to figure out the e-commerce strategy for Nike. I can just tell a kid, no, you shouldn't quit your job until you have another job. It's so easy, especially young men. You're literally, I describe myself, okay, I'm going to be your prefrontal cortex for the next 30 minutes. I'm just going to make really obvious, seemingly easy decisions that you don't seem to be able to make right now, right? No, you shouldn't. You clearly have an alcohol problem and you need to address it before anything.

1:08:14This is what's going on, right? Or you're being a jerk to your parents. Your parents aren't your enemy. They're your allies. Stop it. Just stop it. Anyway, and I have found that, and this is advice to young people, or anybody, think of your time as capital and think of it as an investment portfolio and how are you going to allocate it to its greatest return in terms of impact on others and your own satisfaction. But I'm spending a lot of time now with young men and I find it really rewarding. And that's why I'm so drawn to your work because I think you're having a big impact on young men. I think young men are desperate for what I call a code, right?

1:08:52Fewer of them are playing sports, engaging in church, engaging in their country, not looking to their country as a means of a code, right? They don't have a girlfriend, maybe a strained relationship with their parents. Maybe they're not even engaging in work, so they can't even latch onto the culture of IBM or something like that. So they're in search of a code. And I think the way you outlined stoicism is a pretty decent start for people. Well, I appreciate that. I love your work too. And I think you're doing a great service for people. So I appreciate the kind words and you're a model for me.

1:09:24So it goes both ways. Thanks for that. Well, this is awesome, man. I'm going to be in London in November, by the way, I'm doing a talk. So if you're around, it would be wonderful to see you. Oh, that's great. Where are you doing the talk? At the Troxie in London on November 12th. I'm going to be there. At a minimum, let's grab dinner or drinks or both. And also, if you ever want me to introduce you, if you ever want me to interview you somewhere, use me as a weapon. I'm happy to do that stuff. I would love that. Well, that's awesome. Well, I'll let you go. I appreciate you giving me your time.

1:09:51You're the best. All right. Take care, Ryan. Thanks, man. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.

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