The Surveillance Economy, and How Capitalism Can Fix Poverty

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1:27first and inquire afterwards. Margaret Qualley. Okay, tough guy. And Guy Pearce. Arm up. The Dog Stars, directed by Ridley Scott. In theaters August 28th. Get tickets now. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parents.

1:47Welcome to Office Hours with Prop G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehoursofprofitimedia.com. Again, that's officehoursofprofitimedia.com or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode. Question number one. Hey, Scott, Nick from Western New York again. I have a question about automated surveillance technology. First of all, how do you feel about the implementation of technologies like Flock and other staring or passive systems that utilize AI to flag different markers.

2:25There's been recent stories of automotive journalists who've been pulled over at gunpoint driving Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles because of one misreported stolen plate. My local community has implemented some of these systems. A lot of people are pushing back on them. I personally feel that it's an invasion of people's privacy, but I'm curious what your thoughts are and what the successful path to implementation or pushback is other than the courts, because it doesn't seem as though the Supreme Court or higher courts are receptive to the argument that this is a violation of people's privacy. So that tells me that collective action is required.

2:57I'm curious if you can just kind of give us some thoughts on these technologies in general, their return for society as well as their cost, as well as what we can do as communities if we have strong feelings about this outside of simply going to court. Thank you. Super thoughtful question. So just some data here. Private surveillance has reached a tipping point. point and is now being massively or has hit mass adoption, if you will. There are more than 90 ,000 flat cameras in use around the U.S. A 2023 report estimated that 10 million Americans own ring cameras. Roughly one in five American households have some form of video-enabled doorbell.

3:37Surveillance is up and no accident, crime is down. 2024 to 2025 marked the single largest decrease in violent crime and murder in the U.S. since 1937. Think about that. For all of the ship posting of government and catastrophizing, crime is at historic lows. And there are other factors than technology or surveillance or the fact that you'll probably get caught if you commit a crime. From 2024 to 2025, violent crime decreased 9 percent, property crime decreased 12.4 percent, and motor vehicle theft decreased 23 percent. Deloitte reported smart technologies could help reduce crime by 30 to 40 percent and cut emergency response times by 20 to 35 percent.

4:24Data collection is expanding. Phlox network scans more than 20 billion license plates a month. 20 billion a month. Meta embedded facial recognition in its new smart glass is a feature that, if enabled, would let wearers pull up information about people in their field of view. Critics argue it would allow stalkers, abusers, and federal agents to identify strangers in public. This is a Fourth Amendment issue. The Fourth Amendment protects against government surveillance, but it doesn't constrain private companies or citizens. A Ring doorbell owner can voluntarily share footage with law enforcement without the consent of anyone captured on camera.

4:59Even when owners decline to share footage, Ring and other smart doorbell data are subject to subpoena. Okay. So this is safety versus surveillance. This is, in sum, a free society involves costs. And one of those costs is crime. If we wanted to do away with search and seizure laws, crime would go down. But there's a balance, right? If you own a property, you should have the right to put a camera on it. And if it decreases crime, that's going to create incentive to have more ring cameras, if you will. I find that in general, people talk a big game about privacy concerns, and then they will give Uber all of their data.

5:37Think about Uber. With a hack and a thin layer of AI, you could pretty easily determine if someone just terminated a pregnancy, their HIV status, if they're having affairs, their sexual orientation. You could just figure out a lot about people based on when and where they are going. And yet, we still give Uber all of our data because we love seeing that our QX60 is just around the corner. Why is he turning that way? Anyway, so I don't think you're going to get in the way of this mass adoption. What I think is important is that we have really strong laws and judges that err on the side of not admitting evidence unless it is a real threat, that it is a violent crime, something that has to do something with national defense.

6:31Otherwise, that data is not admissible. In London and New York, you're on candid camera. Supposedly, you can't go eight or 12 feet in either city without being on camera. And they did that because of the terrorist bombings, I think it was from the IRA in the 80s in Britain. And since 9-11, basically, you could argue Manhattan is a surveillance city, not a surveillance state, but a surveillance city. But there's, generally speaking, some laws in place where it is very difficult sometimes to submit that data as evidence. I, for the most part, believe that surveillance and tracking is something that you're not going to get in the way of and that has a lot of benefits, but requires really stringent laws that if it's about, I don't think data admissible in family court should be, unless there's a crime involved, should be submissible.

7:31I don't think unless it's a violent crime, someone, you know, I mean, you have red light cameras. I guess that's technically, that's submissible as evidence. But I think we have to have judges and laws that err on the side of unless it qualifies potentially as a felony, that type of surveillance evidence is not submissible. And the judges err on the side of privacy. There's a fulcrum. There's a tension between privacy and using it as a technology to ensure we continue to see a decline in crime. So what do we need? We need thoughtful laws, and we need thoughtful judges, and we need to figure out what is that balance.

8:13But I would argue right now, the surveillance economy, if you will, is yielding more upside than downside. I appreciate the question. Question number two comes from a listener who texted us. Hi, Scott. I've been a huge fan for years, and I'm thrilled that you have grown so much. Thanks very much. I've been thinking about capitalism. I recognize all of the positive aspects that you discussed, my question is, what do we do about poverty? There has to be a solution. Okay. So some data. Mass poverty has actually been the norm for most of history. Markets and growth are the only thing that has ever reversed it at scale.

8:56The enemy, the antidote to poverty, I believe, is economic growth that leverages self-interest, which is capitalism. In 1950, about 60 % of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, it's about one in 10. So we don't have a poverty problem as much as we have a distribution problem. Maybe I'll come back to that. Some stats regarding poverty in our country, the U.S., 14 % of children are one in seven, and 10 % of all Americans live below the poverty line. I think you can argue that's pretty much unacceptable in a nation that has registered unprecedented prosperity and wealth. From 2021 to 2024, six million children fell below the poverty line.

9:37Columbia University's Center on Poverty and Social Policy attributes this reversal to the expiration of the expanded child tax credit. Practices that are proven to combat poverty. How do you combat it? Tax credits for children, a certain minimum. I don't like, my friend Andrew Yang talked about universal basic income. He screwed up with the word universal. There should just be basic income and basic services and a stronger social safety net. Capitalism gets a bad name because the general assumption is that capitalism involves forgetting about the losers. Capitalism is winners and losers, lower taxes, less government involvement, and you're going to have more inequality.

10:17Americans have opted for inequality because capitalism shows it as a whole. The pie grows as a whole. And on the whole, most people are better off. There are losers. However, there doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be the Hunger Games. People mistake socialism for more empathy and concern. The problem is socialism, the actual term, means government controls the means of production and decides what businesses should get what tax credits. When you implement true socialism, you end up with warehouses of unsold DeLoreans in Ireland or Air France or worse, North Korea or East Germany. What I think most people who use the term socialism are talking about now is the type of capitalism we have had through most of the 20th century in America.

11:00And that is free markets such that companies are owned by private individuals and shareholders and practice full body contact violence to create profits and innovation and margin that are then taxed at a fair rate and redistributed to the middle class and for services to the poor. When I ask people to point to where socialism has ever worked, they say, well, Northern Europe. That's not socialism. That's capitalism. They actually in many ways have more free market competition than we do. Their president is investing in chip companies or steel companies, but they ensure that taxes are paid. We have about a$750 billion tax gap, which means people who owe taxes aren't paid.

11:42And then it's redistributed in terms of social services. Northern European capitalism settles the argument that you can and have billionaires and universal health care. So what works? Capitalism that sits on a bed of empathy where we redistribute income to the middle class, which is the primary engine of capitalism. One of the bullshit arguments on the right is that the middle class is a self-occurring mechanism or organism. It's not. It will die unless we redistribute income into the middle. During Reagan, we had no capital gains tax that was lower than regular income. There was just one source of income.

12:19We should restore that. We have constantly had tax cuts on the wealthiest and corporations. We need to fix that. We need to have or restore child tax credits, and we need to implement universal pre-K and universal health care. I believe that will actually grow the economy. The amount of money we are spending on the sick right now is double what other nations that consider themselves capitalists are spending on health care because they do a better job around investing in preventive healthcare. People aren't scared to go to the doctor. And they also don't let private corporations monetize the health of their nation.

12:57So there are capitalist solutions here. It's just about electing the right leadership. And I worry we're swinging too far to the left with, or gonna swing too far to the left. Right now, we're way too far to the right, in my view, in terms of our leadership. The pendulum is never at the middle. And I worry that people believe that socialism or the government getting more involved in private industry is the way. No, it's not. So let me give you some other examples. Refundable tax credits, including the CTC and EITC, earned income tax credit, have provided the largest anti-poverty benefits to children, working people, and people under 65.

13:31These are fixable problems that we can afford. Child tax credit, universal pre-K, socialized, nationalized health care that over the long time will reduce expenditures, Minimum wage of$20 to$25 an hour. Taxes that, and how do we pay for this? And you have to argue, you have to pay for it. Get rid of the lower tax rate for capital gains. Money's not, money that money makes is not any more noble than money than sweat makes. Everyone should pay the same tax rates above a certain amount of income, whether you got the income from being a partner at Goldman Sachs or you made it from selling stocks. get rid of the estate tax exemption.

14:14If your kid inherits$4 million, not$7 million, he or she's going to be fine. $120 trillion is going to be passed on to future generations in the next 50 years. We are not a dynastic country. That's something that differentiates us from America. If you want to leave enough money for your kid to have a house, maybe a trust fund, fine. But there's no reason that Bezos Jr. should get$60 billion versus$40 billion. For God's sakes, that kind of solves the problem right there. Capitalism works, but it has to have responsible, empathetic governance of which has been in short supply on both sides of the aisles since the Reagan years.

14:59Whew, that was a TED Talk. Thanks for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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18:55Welcome back. Question number three comes from Reading in Astoria on Reddit. Scott, weirdly, my mom convinced me to start listening to you. That is weird. She bought me your book for Christmas last year, notes on being a man. She made me watch adolescence with her. I think, honestly, she thought I was becoming an incel. I'm just shy. I'm wondering if you see bits of hope for young men trying to get out of the manosphere since you started talking about it and writing about it, even just to calm the mothers of America? It's a thoughtful question. So just some data. Drug overdose deaths in America, this is good news, have actually fallen three years in a row from 110 ,000 to 80 ,000 in 2024.

19:34That's the largest single-year drop the CDC has ever recorded to roughly 70 ,000 last year. That's the lowest level since 2019. That's the good news. Men die of overdoses at more than twice the rate of women, and men's rate fell even further, down 27 % in a single year versus 23 % for women. The steepest decline of any age group, 15 to 24-year-olds, down 37%. So something is working. Look, I think a lot of young men, for a variety of reasons, are struggling. Biological, their prefrontal cortex is less mature than a woman's. Economic, a lot of the on-ramps to the middle class without a college degree, dudes are just not as good in school as women.

20:17I think the education system, K-12, is biased against men. If men aren't, boys aren't tired, what do we do in school? Ask someone to raise a hand, be a pleaser, use their fine motor skills, and that you just described is a girl. Boys are twice as likely to be suspended for the exact same behavior as a girl, five times as likely if it's a black boy. I think we need more male teachers in school. I think we need national service. I think we need more male mentorship programs. I think you should start kindergarteners, boys at six, girls at five, because boys are just behind. There needs to be immediate, immediate intervention with male mentorship when a boy loses a male mentor or a father through death, divorce, or abandonment.

20:57So there are absolutely programs that can fix a lot of this. Your mom is correct to be worried. There's a lot of media influencers who are taking advantage of lonely, struggling men that the government has overlooked and the left has ignored. And the right has decided the way to fill that void is by trying to take women and non-whites back to the 50s, which is really dangerous. And some of the voices that have filled this void are really unproductive voices. The manosphere starts out positive. Be fit. Take control of your life. Be action-oriented. Make money. try and find a mate. These are all positive things.

21:34But then it comes off the fucking tracks and becomes about dominance and misogyny. And quite frankly, Grift, the most famous Manosphere characters are trying to convince you to sign up for their$50 a month crypto university or Ponzi slash pyramid Grift scheme. The incel movement, I hate. You're shy, that's fine. I'm actually more introverted as I get older, but you need to put yourself in the company of other people and to get at least comfortable opening and expressing friendship and desires for mentorship. And my brother, you're going to have more success economically and romantically if you force yourself to develop a practice around approaching strangers and developing a rap and a sense of resilience.

22:21I'm not suggesting you need to be a guy with a shiny suit approaching every woman or or every person at a bar, or calling people randomly and trying to sell them on stocks, or what have you. I'm suggesting you need a basic, certain minimum level of willingness to experience discomfort to establish contact with other people. And I hate the insult movement because it's giving men a halt pass to just sit in their fucking basement and play and blame other people for their problems. No. The majority of men have been involuntarily celibate for the majority of their life through the majority of history.

22:56Only 40 % of men have reproduced. You don't have a right to reproduce. You have to earn it like the rest of us. You have to develop a kindness practice, become economically viable, have a plan, work out, get someone to dress you modestly, for God's sake, smell okay, shower, groom, all the shit. It is hard and it's worth it. It's worth it. And the incel movement is nothing but a bunch of fucking grifters trying to give men the excuse that it isn't hard work and they should take some pride in being alone and that it's not their fault and they should blame immigrants for their economic problems and women for their romantic problems.

23:29Bullshit. It's always been hard. And guess what? Like anything that's really hard, it's worth it. But again, it sounds like you have a nice relationship with your mother and very much appreciate the question and the fact that you're even watching these programs and dialing in with such a thoughtful question means, my brother, you're probably going to be just fine. But get out there. Get out there. Approach someone. Express friendship. Hey, do you want to grab a game? Express romantic interest. Do you want to grab coffee? And this is what you're going to get most of the time. No. And guess what?

24:01You're going to be fine and so are they. And that's the key to success. The key to success. You're listening to someone right now. The most common word I have ever experienced is no. And guess what? That's how I got the great fucking yeses. Get to no. Thanks for the question. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehoursofpropgmedia.com. Again, that's officehoursofpropgmedia.com. Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit and we might feature it in an upcoming episode. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Genere.

24:41Kami Rieke is our social producer. Brad Williams is our editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG pod from PropG Media.

24:56I'm Glenn Washington, host of Snap Judgment, the award-winning storytelling podcast from KQED. Every week, Snap deals a new card, like the girl whose sister was a monkey, or the man who lived in the woods for 30 years, or even the woman who snuck her lover out of prison in a dog crate. Pick a card, any card. Tap to listen now to Snap Judgment from KQED on Spotify