Kai Ryssdal on Why the Economy Isn’t as Strong as It Looks

17:22Scott Galloway:curious just when we talk about trying to predict where the economy is headed we're increasingly in the media and i consider myself media adjacent looking at this what appears to be the most accurate or least flawed predictor and that is the prediction markets and i find myself consistently quoting data from calci and polymarket and i'm just curious what your take is on these prediction markets?

17:50Kai Ryssdal:So, number one, they are kind of a black box, right, which is really, really troubling. We don't know what's in there. We don't know who are making these bets. You heard, of course, about this$400 ,000 bet on Maduro being ousted about two hours before he was, and then it paid off to some unknown bettor, right? I mean, what is that? How is that a valid statistical sample of anything? Let me give you an example really close to sort of my professional line of work. So, uh, in the, in the days slash week before Trump named Kevin Warsh to, uh, head the federal reserve, a guy by the name of Rick reader, who you may know, I'm sure you know of him.

18:28Kai Ryssdal:He does a fixed income investment. He's the head of fixed income at BlackRock, the huge money management firm. Um, he'd been a dark horse all along. And then somehow for some reason, his odds on Cal sheet popped up to like 62-ish something percent and out of nowhere. And I will say, by the way, the only reason I found out about this is because I'm on a thread of emails with about 50 or 60 of my fraternity brothers. Rick Reeder was a fraternity brother of mine 45 years ago. He was a year ahead of me. We didn't really know each other, whatever. But anyway, so that's how I found out about it. And I go looking at it.

19:03Kai Ryssdal:And then I start looking for news. And there is no news about why Rick Reeder is somehow going to be the chairman of the Fed. And then sure as hell, Trump says, oh, no, it's going to be one of the two Kevins, Kevin Warsh. So I don't know that, yes, wisdom of the crowds and all that, and people are putting actual money on the line, but you have to take it with a really big grain of salt.

19:22Scott Galloway:And when you think of these prediction markets, do you think that they're going to play a role in, I mean, do you think they're going to sort of become the primary data streams for traders? And my mind sort of starts spinning in terms of how this might impact hedge funds, alternative investments.

19:42Kai Ryssdal:Because you will be able to lay trades with real money on virtually everything, right? Not just, you know, what color jacket is Kamala Harris going to wear to debate, just to pick an old historical example, but also, right, what policy issues are going to be decided, it, where the Supreme Court might come down, all of those big, you know, significant policy moves. And then those Cal Street markets and Polymarket and all the rest of them are going to be followed by people actually making those decisions. And you're like, what are we doing? We'll be right back after a quick break.

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23:43Scott Galloway:Young people seem especially upset or a lot of lack of confidence, consumer confidence, confidence in our institutions. Do you blame them? I don't, but the institutions especially. But I just read an article in The Economist saying, realistically, it's not as bad as they think, that their wage growth is growing. Youth unemployment is at 10%, which is about average if you go back. Do you think that there's something to social media creating sort of a negative vibe, if you will, that makes a bad situation even worse?

24:20Kai Ryssdal:Yeah, look, social media is is a double edged sword and that's sword rather. And that's putting it kindly. But look, let's not let's not talk about young people. Let's not talk about 25 year olds just to pick a demographic today. day, let's think about the future that they're looking at, which is we've already talked about income inequality. The politics of this country are ruptured at best, completely broken at worst. There's no national ambition, national aim. You and I have talked about this before, about what young people need and value in this society and what can help them get there. And national service, I think, is a common interest that you and I both have, right?

25:00Kai Ryssdal:There is none of that shared experience in America today. And so if you're a 25-year-old looking at the future, and look, I should ask my own kids, but what do you see? Are you hopeful? Are you ever going to own a house? How are you going to build wealth? What about your kids and the college application process? And look, I know higher education is a thing for you, and it's deeply, deeply broken. So it's not 25-year-olds today. It's 25-year-olds thinking about, well, as much as 25-year-olds ever do, thinking about when they're 50.

25:28Scott Galloway:Yeah, I was thinking about, if you're 21, it means since the age of 10, the dominant political role model has been Trump. And so during the years where your brain is getting hardwired around incentives and role models, you have someone who is about kind of performative, coarseness, virality, all about money.

25:55Kai Ryssdal:No shame, right? Zero shame. Double down. Common purpose, you bet.

25:59Scott Galloway:A lie is less of a lie the more you repeat it. I mean, it just feels as if, you know, one of the many things I really respect about you, eight years in the Navy, it feels like it's so his, the way he acquits himself personally is so, such an oxymoron or so anathema to the basic code of military service. I don't know if you speak to young men and women service people in the Navy. How do they feel about Trump and our politics right now?

26:30Kai Ryssdal:I don't. It's been a while since I've talked to those folks. But I will tell you that it's not the young people actually in the military. I mean, yes, it is, right? They do the work, the hard work, whether it's a young enlisted sailor, you know, on an aircraft carrier someplace or on a base someplace. But really the people that I worry about who I put the responsibility on are the senior officers, the flag officers, the general officers who know better, who are obliged by their oath and by the Constitution not to do the things, some of the things the president's asking them to do. And I'm looking now at the American Navy Admiral who resigned out of Southern Command over these fishing boat strikes, right?

27:19Kai Ryssdal:Those are the ones who, you know, the video of the six national security experts and veterans in Congress who made that tape that the grand jury just said, no, we're not going to indict you for this. They're not talking to the enlisted Marine, right? They're talking to the Marine colonel. They're talking to the Navy admiral about illegal orders and knowing where that line is. I am, and, you know, I'll just go off topic a little bit. I am, I am the, the absolute cowardice and fear with which the American military is being run now by the secretary of defense is, is to me just, it's incredibly damaging.

28:03Kai Ryssdal:Um, and his behavior and his, um, his ethos and what he thinks the American military stands for is so deeply destructive and porous.

28:15Scott Galloway:Going to young people in the military, we talk a lot about trying to find a code, trying to find something to do. A lot of young men lost. Talk about the armed services and the role it can play in a young person's life in terms of giving them a code. But I knew when I was downstairs, I'm in Europe right now on a ski holiday with my family. And when my producer called me and said, you're up with Kai Riesdahl at six. When I heard Kai Riesdahl at six, I thought, if I don't get there at 5.59, I'll be late because this guy is just on time. Talk about, and I'm curious if you've talked about this with your own kids, but talk about military service as it relates to helping young people establish a code, if you will.

28:58Kai Ryssdal:it is an obligation to something bigger than yourself it is a sense of duty it is um a way you conduct yourself and it's a way that you interact with others it's respect up and down the chain of command it is loyalty and it is uh mission first that said military is not for everybody. And I get that. But I firmly believe that some kind of national service at this point in our history and at this point right now in society is a valuable, valuable thing. You know, you're not going to find a code in the military. You're not going to find honor and obligation and duty. But if you have a sense of it, it will refine it and it will sharpen it and it will distill it to a way that helps you live your life.

29:53Scott Galloway:As someone who served, I was just absolutely, I'm curious to get your thoughts. I'm fascinated by the military and its operational capabilities. The operation in Venezuela, I just couldn't, I literally thought this is something out of a Bond film. Do you have, I mean, my sense is almost every branch of the military was involved here. What were your thoughts when you heard about this operation and how it was pulled off?

30:19Kai Ryssdal:Uh, look, it's really impressive. And it is something fundamentally that only the American military can do, right? It's just, that's just the way it is. You look at the Russians, you look at the Europeans. I mean, nobody has the capability we do. Nobody has the professionalism we do. Uh, and nobody has the technology that we do. Now, now look, you can buy technology, uh, and you can buy capability to some degree. What you can't buy and what is, to get back to my prior point about Secretary of Defense. What is being destroyed by the way he is running that department and by the way the president is letting him run that department is the professionalism of the American military, both the enlisted ranks and the officer rank.

31:02Kai Ryssdal:Look, it was an amazing military operation. It was great. There was a story today about Hegseth denying a promotion to a guy who used to be the spokesman for Mark Milley, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump's first term and then for a little while afterward, and who Trump has said ought to be executed. And this guy, because he had worked for Milley, career Army officer, up for promotion to Brigadier General, because he had worked for Milley, the reporting is, Hegseth said, nope, I'm going to fire you. And he basically slow rolled his nomination to Brigadier General until the guy said, you know what?

31:37Kai Ryssdal:I'm not going to hold up the promotion of all of my fellow colonels to general, so I'm going to retire. I mean, that's insane. That's insane. It's operating from a position of fear and weakness. And it, to me, is just, it's one of the most discouraging things, actually, about the second Trump administration.

31:56Scott Galloway:I'm curious, you said you left the service at 29, and I'm sure you know people who decided to spend the next one or two decades in the service. Oh, yeah. How would you distinguish the difference between the people who serve as you did for several years versus those who decide to make it their career.

32:12Kai Ryssdal:Yeah. So, uh, so I think about this every now and then, actually, if I'd stayed, well, I'd probably be retired by now, but you know, I could have been like a, you know, like a two-star maybe, maybe, maybe a three-star, you know, I'm a reasonably competent guy. Um, look, the, the military was for me an amazing thing that I did, uh, when I was 21, 22 years old. Um, It was not, though, as it was for most of the guys in—some of the guys in my squadron, right? I was flying E2Cs out of Norfolk, Virginia off the USS Theodore Roosevelt. For some of the guys in my squadron, that was their whole gig. That was all they wanted to do.

32:52Kai Ryssdal:That was it for them. And for me, it was an opportunity to, number one, serve, right, which was really important to me, but also to refine and help define my character. And then by the time I left the Navy, I had done everything that I joined the Navy to do, right? I had seen the world. I had gone to graduate school. I had learned how to fly, you know, all that stuff. And it was time to do something else. And obviously, most veterans out there are like me. They've done a tour, four years. They've done maybe eight years. There aren't, you know, most people don't stick for 20 years in the military or 25.

33:28Kai Ryssdal:five. But I would bet the value judgment coming out is the same after four years or 20 years. This was an experience that helped define my life. And look, there are many, many terrible things. I know I'm caveating a lot of things here, but there are some not great things about, number one, the American military, but number two, about the lifestyle and the challenges that it creates for families and for young people. I mean, the idea that we have American enlisted people on food stamps is insane and embarrassing. But it is, no matter how you slice it, a definitional moment.

34:02Scott Galloway:So trying to collide your experience in the Navy with a one-man prediction market, Kai Rizdahl, when you see or hear about the movements of carrier strike forces into the Mediterranean and in and around Iran, what's your best guess as to what's going to happen there?

34:18Kai Ryssdal:Oh, man. Number one, I have no idea because the president of the United States is a chaos agent and trying to predict him is a fool's errand. Number two is, look, this is part of what these carrier movements are is a show of force and we can do this. And that is literally what carrier strike forces are for, right? Number one, projection of power, sure. But number two, showing the flag, showing that we can if we want to. The challenge, of course, again, to go back to point number one, is that the president of the United States is a chaos agent and you don't know what he's going to do. So I don't think you could put a lot of stock in the mere movement, right?

34:55Kai Ryssdal:Maybe negotiating, maybe we're not. You know, Steve Whitcoff is doing this. Jared Kushner is doing that. Who knows? The mere movement of a carrier strike force is a tried and true presidential tactic. You know, lots of people have done it.

35:10Scott Galloway:We'll be right back.

35:16Scott Galloway:Hi, this is Kara Swisher. And this week on my podcast, On with Kara Swisher, I talked to California Governor Gavin Newsom.

35:23Kai Ryssdal:While he hasn't officially announced or run for president yet, he's telegraphing it all the time. It's exhausting. He's also got a new book out, which is what you do when you're running for president. It's called Young Man in a Hurry. I recently interviewed him live in San Francisco. Have a listen. The problem with the Democratic Party so often is we appear weak. and we've got to be stronger and we've got to be more assertive. And so that's, you know, it's the spirit, I think, that is required of this moment.

35:48Scott Galloway:I've known Gavin Newsom since he was mayor of San Francisco a million years ago, a million hair gels ago. And he's a really interesting and compelling politician.

35:56Kai Ryssdal:He's done a lot of things in his career. And this one, this run for presidency, which is going to happen,

36:02Scott Galloway:is among the most interesting. You can find A Full Conversation wherever you get your podcasts

36:06Kai Ryssdal:and on YouTube, obviously. be sure to follow and subscribe to On With Kara Swisher for more.

36:16Scott Galloway:So everyone knows our politics are divided. There's left versus right and dividing lines on age, gender or race. But maybe our biggest divide in our politics isn't about identity at all. It's insiders versus outsiders. At least that's what Congressman Roe Conner would say. The real issue is two tiers of justice in America. The real issue is people with power and wealth using it to be above the law and escape even investigation or prosecution. And it's only gotten more noticeable in recent months, as issues like the Epstein files and artificial intelligence have seemed to pit the elites against everybody else.

36:54Scott Galloway:California Congressman Ro Khanna takes on the Epstein class. Today explained in your feed every weekday and now on Saturdays, too.

37:10Scott Galloway:We're back with more from Kai Rizdahl. So when we get guests and we've had very famous people, the not so famous people, we have a sense for how they're going to do. And occasionally someone surprises us to the upside and the downside. And we knew you'd do well, but you're one of our most downloaded guests in the history of this podcast. And so we thought we would come up with a series of questions from people who want to know more about Kai or get inside his brain. And so I'll kick it off before we go to these listener questions. I'm curious, where do you invest your money?

37:45Kai Ryssdal:I have zero control over the money in my household for two reasons. Number one, my wife is the brains in the family. She's deeply interested in investing. She takes great care with it. Um, and she's good at it. And fundamentally, it just doesn't interest me that much at all. That's number one. Number two, though, and more substantively, I should not, given the platform that I have and the subject matter of that platform, um, I should not know where I'm invested. I should not have even a, a, a hint of an interest in a story we do about Amazon or NVIDIA or, or take your pick publicly traded company.

38:24Kai Ryssdal:So it drives my wife nuts at times. but I stay as far away from that as I reasonably can.

38:30Scott Galloway:What would you advise your kid? One of your kids says, dad, I got 10 ,000 bucks. Where should I invest? What would you say? You should talk to your mother. Talk to your mother.

38:38Kai Ryssdal:Sir, come on. No, that is absolutely what I say. My mother is, so look, my kids are bright, ambitious and they're doing really well in life, the older ones. But I'm not the guy. I couldn't tell you. My wife could tell you. All right.

38:56Scott Galloway:This is unusual, Kai. We got a surprising number of beer questions. Oh, yeah. All-time favorite beer.

39:03Kai Ryssdal:Well, look, so the OG is a stone IPA from Stone Breweries down in San Diego, down by a Japanese brewery. These days, it's hit or miss. I don't drink as much as I used to, but now it's a hazy IPA, a good, solid hazy IPA, and I'm in there.

39:19Scott Galloway:Give us your weekend. Give us Kai Rizdal's weekend. How do you spend your time?

39:24Kai Ryssdal:So, let's see. I am a high school and college soccer referee. I do a lot of soccer for kids as well. So sometimes I'll spend four or five hours doing a soccer game. I'll get a workout. There is always stuff to do around the house. Our house is 113 years old, so everything needs to be done. So you're handy? I am handy by virtue of owning a home for 25 years.

39:54Scott Galloway:Well, I own several homes and I'm not handy. So you're not giving yourself enough credit. You're good.

39:58Kai Ryssdal:You know how to fix shit. I know what tools to buy. And then, you know, I hang around with my wife. We're empty nesters now. We go for long walks. We'll pick up a movie. We'll go out to dinner. You know, we just kind of hang around.

40:11Scott Galloway:So a few people mentioned in our request for the voicemails we got and on Instagram that you've been MIA from Marketplace. What's going on?

40:21Kai Ryssdal:So, let's see. Number one, I got sick, so I took a couple of days off. Then I was on a trip to a conference in Prague. It was a bang-bang in and out to Europe, which I do not recommend. And then I was off yesterday for the holiday, and I'm off today because I have a high school playoff game at 3 o 'clock, which conflicts with me actually being on the radio.

40:42Scott Galloway:And why do you enjoy coaching—I'm sorry, refereeing soccer?

40:46Kai Ryssdal:A couple of reasons. Number one, it's a sport I played growing up. And more substantively, though, I enjoy the challenge of having to make split-second decisions when your heart rate is 160. When you're trying to keep up with kids who are like 18 years old, it is, and this is not my phrase, it's a phrase I heard on a soccer podcast. It's a high-speed leadership test, while at the same time, you as the referee have to be the calmest guy on the field. And I find that really like intellectually stimulating. The other thing is, so I run in the mornings up in the hills behind my house and it's my time of day to just disconnect and let my brain go wherever it's going to go.

41:32Kai Ryssdal:There's a corollary when you're on a soccer field in that you can't be thinking about anything else, whether it's got to get the car fixed. What am I having for dinner? That moron at work. You have to be there in that moment for the 22 players on the field. Otherwise, you're going to fuck it up and you're going to look like an idiot and you're going to change the match. And that's terrible.

41:53Scott Galloway:So I'm going to inject a few of my own questions. Likelihood Governor Newsom, the president of the fourth largest economy in the world, your state, is the Democratic nominee for president.

42:03Kai Ryssdal:Ooh, ooh, ooh. I thought you were going to say whether he's going to run. Obviously, it's 101 % chance that he's going to run. I think it's like 50-50 he gets the nomination. Saying that - That high. That's a coin flip. That's high. I think it is a coin toss, right? Because it depends on who else is in the field. You know, Whitmer, Buttigieg, Shapiro. I don't know. I mean, Newsom's almost too perfect, right? He's got the look. He's got the smile. He's got the hair. You know, all of that jazz. But coming from California is a big, big swing.

42:33Scott Galloway:Do you think it's becoming less of a liability? My sense is that at least the portions of California that everyone seems to be obsessed with, specifically San Francisco, are having a bit of a renaissance. Do you think it's going to be the same liability?

42:45Kai Ryssdal:San Francisco was unfairly slighted. Things were bad, right? There were really big problems. But, you know, the rule of thumb is nothing is ever as bad or as good as you think it is. California, San Francisco had some problems. L.A. has had some problems. But generally speaking, I think San Francisco is doing pretty well right now. None of that is due to anything that Newsom's doing. Same thing with Los Angeles. But you can't talk about California now as if it's a failed state.

43:18Scott Galloway:Mm-hmm. What was the big moment in your career that sort of, was there an inflection point where things really started to take off for you? You mean professionally? Yeah.

43:27Kai Ryssdal:Oh, yeah. So I, there were two. One was getting into radio in the first place. And I'll give you the very short version of a very long story. But my wife was about to start her MBA program up in the Bay Area. And I was 34 years old. We were freshly married. We were thinking about starting a family. And I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had done eight years in the military, four years in the Foreign Service. And she sat me down one day and she said, look, I think you ought to try journalism because you're this freak who gets up at 5 o 'clock in the morning to figure out what's going on.

44:00Kai Ryssdal:You get the New York Times first thing off the doorstep. That shows you how long ago this was. and long story short, I applied for and got an internship at KQED, which is the public radio station up in San Francisco. And so the very first day of our internship, there were five of us around the second floor conference table. Four of them were 19 and I was 34. But they taught me, KQED taught me everything I need to know about radio and being on the air. And so I did that for a couple of years. And then the guy who used to run Marketplace heard me and they were looking for a person to host their, their overnight program.

44:35Kai Ryssdal:It airs, uh, at two 50 in the morning, LA time to get the East coast drive time. So obviously it's, you know, you work midnight to noon basically. Um, and he heard, he heard me on a, on a report up at KQED and he called me again, very long story short. I started there in 2001 working the overnights. Um, and that was, that That was, you know, 25 years ago, and here I am 25 years later. So those were the two moments, really.

45:03Scott Galloway:I kind of grew up with your voice when I was a little bit older, but when I was younger, my first job out of school was Morgan Stanley, and I drove from—I was living with my mother, and I drove from Westwood to downtown to Figueroa Street. And there was a voice of—I don't know, was it KQED or KCRW? I forget which the LA station was. It must have been KCRW. KCRW. And there was a voice, similar to your voice, this great voice that sort of reeked of credibility who hosted in the mornings. And I listened for two years and I thought, and I'd never done this before. I'm not, I wasn't a philanthropic person.

45:34Scott Galloway:I thought I should probably give up 50 or 100 bucks. And I didn't know how to do it. So I called and a lesson in how scrappy KCRW was. The host answered the phone.

45:46Kai Ryssdal:Yeah, yeah, that was back in the day, man. That was back in the day.

45:49Scott Galloway:It was like, okay, this is literally feels like a guy and a producer and tens of thousands of people listening to this person driving downtown. So when I think of public radio, I think of a little bit, depending on the generosity of strangers. And then I can't help but bridge to, you know, Republican billionaires by football teams, Democratic billionaires by media companies. We had one, I don't know if he's Democrat, I don't know what his politics are, but we had a billionaire, Jeff Bezos, by the Washington Post. What are your thoughts on how the post has played out and Bezos' role in it? It's a travesty.

46:25Kai Ryssdal:It's a travesty. You have to give him credit, though, for the first—look, he bought it in 2013, really invested, expanded the newsroom. And then, you know, comes that spiking of the Kamala Harris endorsement by the now former publisher Will Lewis, almost certainly at Bezos' behest. I don't think Will Lewis does that by himself. And then it all goes downhill from there. And look, Lewis and Bezos, because he owns the thing, were not able to capitalize on the changes in the news environment, right? They weren't able to adjust and flow with the times, much as many other media organizations, including some in public radio, have not been able to do.

47:07Kai Ryssdal:And then the cut started. And Lewis lost credibility. And the newsroom shrank. And now you've just seen, you know, what, three weeks ago, 300 more people out the door. It is absolutely travesty that they haven't been able to figure this out, that Bezos has allowed to happen what he has allowed to happen. It's a loss for, number one, the people of that area, right? Because the Washington Post is first and foremost a regional newspaper. They do incredible national work, but they're the regional paper in a really influential and significant market. it. And then just for what it says about journalism and how we are now at the whims, you know, look at the LA Times and Patrick's, you and Sean, we're at the whim of incredibly wealthy people.

47:53Kai Ryssdal:And that's no way to run a democracy.

47:56Scott Galloway:If an incredibly wealthy person came to you and said, Kai, I want to buy a media property that you think is underleveraged, and I want you to run it, what would you want to buy?

48:05Kai Ryssdal:Well, first of all, I would say you don't want me running anything. There's a reason I'm, I'm talent and not management. So look, I would probably try to put together some consortium of the big public radio stations. I would take WNYC. I would take WBEZ in Chicago. I would take KQED. I would take KPCC here in Los Angeles. And then maybe two in the South, maybe in Dallas and in Atlanta, and try to form some consortium and change the organizational structure. Look, I love public radio. It has given me everything in my professional life the last 25 years. The way the command structure works between the local stations and the national management is just, it's a recipe for disaster.

48:52Kai Ryssdal:So that would be my whack, right? Because I think it is truly an underleveraged asset, both in terms of its financial abilities, right? We have tens and tens and tens and millions of listeners, but also in its structure.

49:07Scott Galloway:And what's wrong with the structure? Why is it so dysfunctional?

49:10Kai Ryssdal:So the problem is that we are built on a network of member stations. Look, Marketplace is not a NPR program. If you're listening to this and you want to write to me about the actual structure of Marketplace and APM, go ahead and do that. But I'll speak about public radio. We are built on a network of stations across the country, hundreds and hundreds of them. They pay, number one, carriage fees and then also program fees up the chain so that public radio program providers, American Public Media, MyEmployer, NPR, others, can produce those programs and then send them down the chain. The catch is that those stations rightly want a vote in the running of the larger organization.

49:54Kai Ryssdal:And the tension is, are you responsible in your management of this entire structure? Are you responsible for the national strategy? Or are you responsible for what the station in Sheboygan wants? Or the station in Charlotte, North Carolina wants? And that is the tension between the stations and the national strategy. And it's really, really hard, and I get it. And it's a 50-, 60-year organizational structure that has been cemented now. And changing it would be really, really hard. But if I had a gazillion dollars, that's where I would put my money.

50:36Scott Galloway:And the revenue model, I don't know how it breaks down. Who funds it? Where does it get its funding from?

50:43Kai Ryssdal:So as we all know, the federal government no longer supports public media. And I will say, and this may brand me something of a heretic, and maybe I'll get in trouble. I don't know. I think that's a good thing. I think it was a terrible, terrible sequence of events that got public media hooked on federal financing. I think if LBJ, in the Public Broadcasting Act of 67, whatever it was, had said, here's$10 million in 1967 money. Here's your seed money. Go forth, build, but that's it. Then we wouldn't be in the place we are now where small stations and some big ones are in real financial challenge because they don't have federal funding coming anymore.

51:25Kai Ryssdal:This is way down, way, way, way down the rabbit hole, right? Right. Now what's happened is that we're without that money and we're scrambling. And so the big program providers are having to subsidize smaller stations and organizations so that they can keep carrying Marketplace and all things considered and all the other national programs. So that's actually the real funny challenge. Then, of course, we have advertising. We call it underwriting on public radio because we have to be cute about that. It makes me crazy. And then we have philanthropy, both people and philanthropic groups who give us grants.

52:00Kai Ryssdal:And in theory, it's a really nice triad, right? That we have ads, we have large philanthropy, and then we have listeners. But we need to scale it better than we have.

52:12Scott Galloway:Last question as we wrap up here, Kai. what do you think of economic strikes?

52:17Kai Ryssdal:Of economic strikes? Like general strikes?

52:20Scott Galloway:This is a loaded question because obviously I'm involved in one, but national economic strikes is a mean of trying to dictate policy.

52:26Kai Ryssdal:Look, the best lever consumers have in this economy is to not consume, right? Can you repeat that? I'm preaching to the choir here, right? And I've watched with interest your, what is it, unsubscribe and resist? Resist and unsubscribe. Yeah. I think it's really interesting. I think it's interesting that that's where you've gone, just as a guy with your history and your skill at capitalism. But I also think it's an optic lesson. The most significant thing we can do is withhold our money. And that's the way you get people's attention. That's the way you get the CEO's attention. That's the way you get the regional attention.

53:11Kai Ryssdal:That's the way you get your supermarkets.

53:13Scott Galloway:That's the way you get it. The most significant thing we can do is withhold our money. Kai Rizdahl is a genius. This is a man with a Brad Pitt-like voice who has incredible insight. He's also the host and senior editor of the public media program Marketplace, the nation's most listened to show on business and the economy. The most listened to show on business and the economy. He joins us from his home or a shed behind his home in Los Angeles, California. Kai Rizdal, one of our most popular guests. Very much appreciate your time today.

53:50Kai Ryssdal:Always great to be out, Scott. I appreciate you.

54:09Scott Galloway:Algebra of happiness. Do you have a debt? I have a debt. I've talked about this before, but I think it's worth mentioning again. Look at everything in your life that wasn't your fault. Look at the components of your success and your blessings that weren't your fault. Was it the irrational passion for your well-being of your parents? Was it Pell Grants? Was it getting to build a company on a massive communications network that became the internet? Was it enjoying low taxes, of which America has had extraordinarily low taxes for the last 40 years. What is it? Is it a group or a way that you met other really interesting people called college?

54:49Scott Galloway:What was it that America welcomed your parents into this country? What about your success, when you reverse engineer it, is not your fault? And then try and support those things. Also, do you have a debt? I look at my life, I've gotten so much from this country, and that's not just pounding my chest. And again, assisted lunch, student loans, unparalleled prosperity in the history of mankind. From 1945 to 2000, the U.S. registered a third of the world's economic growth with 5 % of the population. So 6x the prosperity. And then the majority of that 6x was crammed into the fraction of the population or the third of the population that was white, heterosexual, and male.

55:37Scott Galloway:Not a good thing, by the way, but I recognize that I've had 10 to 15x the prosperity of the average citizen born in 1964 through no fault of my own. So what got me there? Incredible civil rights, incredible prosperity, capitalism, competitive markets, state-sponsored higher ed. I got to go to UCLA and Berkeley for a total of$7 ,000 for seven years, undergrad and grad. Total tuition,$7 ,000. And not only was it affordable, it was accessible. 74 % admissions rate when I applied to UCLA. So bottom line, as awesome as I am, how can I not give back to the University of California? How can I not nod to the California taxpayers and the regions of the University of California?

56:31Scott Galloway:Do you have a debt? If you're my age and you have some prosperity, you have a debt. And through civil war, world wars, plagues, incredible challenges to our democracy, whether it was slavery, whether it was putting people because of their Japanese ancestry behind barbed wire encampments, whether it was incredible racism, whether it was homophobia, whether it was not acknowledging AIDS was a crisis, Americans of that generation have risen to the moment, realizing they have a debt and realizing that America is what we make of it. And I believe we're in one of these moments right now, that we have effectively lost the script around the Constitution, co-equal branches of government, the importance of dignity across all individuals, the importance of voting, and how important it is to have free and safe elections.

57:33Scott Galloway:I generally don't get freaked out. I think this is go time. And again, you're going to have to ask yourself, Dad, Mom, what did you do during the war? So two questions, and I'll go in reverse order. What did you do? And two, Do you have a debt? Do you feel as if you owe, that you need to nod to the things that got you here now? And so what do you do? I like the advice from Teddy Roosevelt. He said, do what you can with what you have in this moment.

58:10Scott Galloway:This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Jannere. Cammie Reek is our social producer. Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG pod from PropG Media.