Prof G Markets: Predictions for 2025

Follow Prof G Markets: Apple Podcasts Spotify Scott shares his predictions for the year ahead, including his picks for the top investment, technology, and media platform of 2025. He also forecasts what could become the standout IPO of the year. And for the first time ever, Scott ventures into uncharted territory with his prediction for the "chemical of the year." Order "The Algebra of Wealth," out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Follow Scott on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram and X Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:59Scott Galloway?

  Today's number, 37 million. That's how many times a Prop G episode was downloaded in 2024. How do you know I have a podcast? I tell you.

• 1:20Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to Prop G Markets. Ed, that was the best I could come up with. I couldn't, I couldn't come up with something.

• 1:26Ed Elson?

  That's good. We're just basking in the glory of it. It's pretty incredible, no? I was, I was pretty happy with that number.

• 1:32Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, that's, this is the way I think. I'm like, why wasn't it 38 million? Like, it's Ed's fault. I don't, I'm a glass half empty kind of guy. By the way, I think, I think Joe Rogan does that, I don't know, in about seven, eight minutes.

• 1:46Ed Elson?

  Yeah, true. You put it that way. We got some work to do.

• 1:50Scott Galloway?

  Yeah. That's why we've raised your salary from 775 to 785 an hour. It's, uh, you're really bringing home the bacon here.

• 1:58Ed Elson?

  That's right. Well, let's, let's get to it, Scott. For our first episode of the year, we're going to walk through your predictions for 2025. So we'll cover your thoughts on what's in store for tech and markets and media. And we're also going to try to address some of the audience's questions and their comments from your predictions livestream that happened in December.

• 2:19Ed Elson?

  Sound good?

• 2:20Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, that sounds great. Let's do it.

• 2:21Ed Elson?

  Let's jump in. So your first prediction here, a new duopoly is forming. OpenAI and Nvidia will be the power couple of 2025. Give us your thoughts on the Open Video prediction.

• 2:34Scott Galloway?

  Well, just as there was Windtel, you have what is effectively somewhere between 88 and 90% of traffic to and the percentage of AI searches or queries powered by OpenAI and powered by Nvidia. And while there's a few players we talk about, whether it's Claude, or we don't really talk about anyone in the chip market, although we talked about IBM, but that was quantum computing. These guys have more dominance, I would argue, than Windtel. But this is the new, the new duopoly of the age. And what's so striking is these are fairly new companies. But between the two of them, they have, well, I guess Nvidia is about 3.2 trillion, and they have about a $3.5 trillion market capitalization.

• 3:19Ed Elson?

  Moving on to the future of AI, software as a service and service as a software. What did you mean by that?

• 3:25Scott Galloway?

  If you think about software as a service, it's basically the cloud, and that is you rent out the cloud to such that people can build applications on top of it. AI, I think, is or the next iteration of AIs, we got some of the infrastructure plays figured out or full body contact. We got the LLMs. I do think that this new technology is going to create a bunch of new unicorns around very specific applications where people build a thick layer of innovation on top of the GPU, on top of an LLM, and offer sort of, for example, a specific application that leverages an LLM and a GPU to create a very specific niche form of

• 4:07Scott Galloway?

  AI that helps people, say, with backend compliance for the banking sector, or that figures out a way to offer certain types of personal injury law firms, a specific type of AI that helps them write contracts more specifically. I think there's going to be a bunch of niche applications, specifically in the enterprise, in the back office. I think it's going to create. A bunch of kind of AI apps, if you will, or AI-driven apps. I think there's real opportunity in travel. There's real opportunity in health, but they will be branded. They will use, you know, OpenAI and Nvidia will benefit because they'll be built on top of them. But there'll be little niche applications that focus on specifics.

• 4:51Scott Galloway?

  Just think about how Craigslist kind of picked apart newspapers or classifieds. They went after the movies, then they went after car sales. These applications will start kind of picking apart, if you will, various niche applications. So I called it services of software.

• 5:07Ed Elson?

  Moving on to your technology of 2025, which you have chosen is nuclear.

• 5:13Scott Galloway?

  Well, the stopgap or the friction in the growth of AI isn't, or at least the smartest people in AI or the biggest players don't feel that it's customers or capital or even employees or human capital. It's the energy to power these queries, which are ten times more energy consumptive than a similar query on Google. And it's whether it's Altman trying to raise money or thinking about investing in nuclear startups or it's Bezos partnering with Constellation to reconnect or fire up Three Mile Island again, which would have just been unthinkable only a few years ago. It's clear that they've they've figured out that the choke point here will be we're going to run out of energy pretty quickly and that we've got to bring new energy online.

• 5:58Scott Galloway?

  And even Meta just announced they've asked, they put out an RFP looking for somebody to show up and build them a giant nuclear power plant to power their business operations. Specifically, I would imagine their plans around AI. And for me, most roads, if not all roads, lead to what is arguably, I believe, some of the most cleanest, reliable energy, and that is nuclear. So I think nuclear is going to have a big, a big year in 2025.

• 6:22Ed Elson?

  We've got a listener question here from Steve who asks, what are the best ways to invest in nuclear? I mean, I can just list a couple of good nuclear energy stocks.

• 6:34Scott Galloway?

  Go ahead, Ed. You probably know more about this than I do.

• 6:36Ed Elson?

  Constellation Energy is a big name that we've been talking about. Vistra is a good name. It's another stock you can invest in investing in nuclear. Also Entergy Corporation. I mean, there are a lot of nuclear energy stocks out there. Those are probably the biggest three or probably the most promising. But, you know, we've also talked about how big tech is investing in their own nuclear operations. I feel like a very safe play. You're going to get some of the nuclear momentum if you just stay in big tech, to be honest. I mean, they're all investing in that anyway.

• 7:05Scott Galloway?

  What I would want to do, so I'm pretty sure all the stocks you mentioned are up pretty massively in 2024. So word is out.

• 7:11Ed Elson?

  That's definitely right.

• 7:12Scott Galloway?

  And I would say if you're going to do this, try and find a fund that has a bunch of them. I just think it's dangerous to bet on any one of these because I think the run up has been pretty, pretty violent here. What I think is more interesting is, I remember when we started talking about GLP-1 18 months ago and how it was going to be revolutionary. And then, you know, about the time that podcasters are on to an idea, the smart money has piled in about six months before that.

• 7:40Ed Elson?

  No, we're Ali. We're always Ali.

• 7:42Scott Galloway?

  We're really, and Nova Nordisk was up dramatically, as was Eli Lilly. But Mia Severio, our analyst, said she found little, little publicly traded companies that, for example, made syringes for semaglutides. So I think if you were a fund manager, if you're a consumer, don't spend your time on this shit. Buy index funds, or if you're really fascinated by nuclear, there's probably a nuclear ETF. That's, you know, likely to be a little bit more, I don't know, diversified, if you will. But if you're a manager and you really want to do some homework, or you want to take a little bit of your capital. I think what you want to find is the materials or the basic boring companies that build stuffs materials for nuclear. So I would imagine there's a certain type of paint resin that you got to put on these

• 8:27Scott Galloway?

  reactors, or there's a certain type of shelving, or a certain type of composites, or minerals, or some people are saying the play is in uranium now. So I think you're going to have to do more work and go further downstream and look at some of the materials and the suppliers, or even the vendors that should benefit from an explosion of nuclear, because word's out.

• 8:46Ed Elson?

  Word is out. That's definitely right. I definitely wouldn't recommend it as if I were stock picking. Let's move on to your investment of 2025, which would be emerging markets.

• 8:57Scott Galloway?

  If you look at over the last 40 or 50 years, there's kind of eight to 15 year periods where the US outperforms the rest of the world, and then the rest of the world outperforms the US. And it's basically all about flows of capital. And even if you're Argentina and you have good companies, everyone has been so negative on Argentina for so long that there's just flows of capital out. And basically about 5% of institutional money has gone into some of these emerging markets or BRICS, and it's usually around 8% or 9%. So there's been a massive flow out of capital. So even if the company is performing well, the flow of capital out of that market means there's just fewer people wanting to buy stocks. And you've seen these markets underperform the US market substantially.

• 9:40Scott Galloway?

  And now the US market represents 50% of total market cap of all stocks globally, which is what you would call a cyclical high. And everyone from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan have said, when stocks are this high, usually returns go down. And I believe that what we're going to see is that after a 15-year bull market run for US stocks, we're going to start to see the river or the flow of capital reverse, and we're going to see more people go hunting for cheaper stocks in emerging markets. Even for example, Argentina's stocks have boomed the last few months under new leadership. I think that's likely going to infect Brazil. People are going to start looking at stocks in Brazil.

• 10:23Scott Galloway?

  Stocks there actually look quite cheap still. You can buy pretty solid companies there, including their biggest bank, their biggest iron ore producer for a P E of about five. So I believe we're in a kind of a cyclical moment or a high in terms of capital flows into the U.S. And some, I'm rotating out of U.S. centric investments into other markets. I think the world ex the U.S. is going to likely outperform the U.S. over the next five to 10 years. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity in some of these beaten down markets.

• 10:57Ed Elson?

  Emerging markets is such a weird term. It feels so outdated at this point.

• 11:01Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, non-U.S. I don't know. I don't know what to say.

• 11:04Ed Elson?

  But then it's like you, there should be multiple different categories among emerging markets. I mean,

• 11:08Scott Galloway?

  It needs a brand.

• 11:09Ed Elson?

  It needs a brand, exactly. You said platform of 2025. I love this take is YouTube. Why is that?

• 11:16Scott Galloway?

  Well, when you think about streaming media, if you ask people, what's the premier streaming video platform? They would say Netflix. Maybe wrong. It's 8% share of total hours on streaming video. YouTube's 11%. YouTube, I believe, has 50 billion in revenue. Netflix has 38. And if you look at the numbers and just the trends, YouTube continues to take share from almost everybody. And they have a paid offering. They also, I think, are the most elegant ad-supported medium. What do I mean by that? Podcasts do host readovers. Those are kind of elegant and there's a skip button. So it's not quite as obtrusive or it's more palatable. But I find the ads on YouTube less obtrusive than any other ad-supported media. When ads come on TV, I just can't even tolerate it. I'm like, oh, shit.

• 12:01Scott Galloway?

  I somehow I ended up watching Goodfellas on the TNT networker. And I'm like, that's it. I'm done. I'll see Joe Pesci get whacked next week or something. But the ads on YouTube, I think, are really well done in terms of the skip now. Cause they say, okay, if you're not interested in this, you're not going to watch the full ads. You might as well skip now. And also just in our business, it feels like overnight. Whereas Apple and Spotify kind of controlled were the primary distribution mechanisms for podcasts. Now it's YouTube and we're scrambling to figure out a YouTube strategy. And what just struck me was Joe Rogan got 15 or 18 million downloads on traditional podcast listening devices and he had 40 million or 50 million views on YouTube.

• 12:46Scott Galloway?

  So it strikes me that YouTube is just going from strength to strength. Young people seem to be really intoxicated with YouTube, increasing their time on the platform. So it's, it's got an exceptionally strong ad-supported or more elegant ad-supported business model. And I love ad-supported mediums right now that are working because while more and more consumers are exiting the advertising ecosystem, the majority, the, the reason why our CPMs continue to go up pretty dramatically here at Profiteam Markets is that we attract a young, wealthy male. That is a great white rhino of advertising right now because those individuals are not watching ad-supported mediums.

• 13:31Scott Galloway?

  They're not, they don't, most, most of them don't even have a TV. They're on Netflix and Spotify and YouTube. And YouTube's the only place where you can reach them if you're Pepsi or you're Warner Brothers launching, you know, a Marvel film. It's one of the few places you can still reach this group that is largely abandoned ad-supported media. So I'm just exceptionally bullish on the YouTube platform.

• 13:55Ed Elson?

  I totally agree with that. And I'll just add one thing on. I think, as I've said before, I think one of the big strengths of YouTube is the comment section because of its ability to just facilitate socialization and interaction. And there are many other features on YouTube that are about that. The idea of, you know, having a subscriber base and having live streaming functionality. When YouTube is all about interaction, it's not just about watching the content. And what I will say is that the platforms I believe are going to succeed alongside YouTube are the ones that take notes from. YouTube and there is one platform that is doing that really well right now. And it's Spotify. Spotify over the past few months has unveiled

• 14:40Ed Elson?

  all of these new features that are definitely taken out of the YouTube playbook. They're now doing a comment section. They're incorporating video into the platform. We just saw this recently. They're letting us as the podcaster put out polls to interact with the audience. Spotify has gotten the memo. It's all about engagement and interaction because just watching and consuming is not interesting enough in 2025. I think the other thing I love about the comments is it's sort of like a reality check from the audience. Like if I were to go on there on like CNN and just spew some bullshit that didn't make any sense. I would never hear any feedback from it.

• 15:18Scott Galloway?

  Who does that?

• 15:21Ed Elson?

  That was not directed at you. You're incisive on CNN and people say that. But if I were to go on TV and just say a bunch of nonsense, I would never get the feedback I need to learn. Actually, that didn't make any sense. And what's beautiful about YouTube is every week we are held accountable by the audience. If we say something that is dumb or rude or aggressive or something that people don't like, they're going to tell us in the comments. And that's one of the things that I love about it. It keeps us honest.

• 15:48Scott Galloway?

  I agree. And you're right around consumer engagement and I invested in a company called Open Web and all it does is help these media platforms organize their comments such that they're less toxic and the better comments rise to the top and it makes that entire, if you will, it's its own media. Comments are its own kind of media vehicle. It makes them advertiser friendly and then they help monetize the comments for media companies. Anyways, I think comments were sort of the last monetizable media in big tech. We'll be right back.

• 16:34Scott Galloway?

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• 17:18Scott Galloway?

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• 17:51Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The Agentic Trust Platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof?

• 18:36Scott Galloway?

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• 18:57Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. Their Agentic Trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof?

• 19:42Scott Galloway?

  Over 16,000 fast-growing companies like Ramp, Ryder, and Harvey save time and resources while scaling fast with Vanta. Learn more at vanta.com/profg and get $1,000 off. That's spelled V-A-N-T-A dot com slash profg for $1,000 off.

• 20:09Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof G Markets. Your media of 2025 is, no surprise here, podcasts. Take us through it.

• 20:16Scott Galloway?

  Podcasts are going to grow faster, a granite off a lower base, than Meta or Alphabet, I believe, in 2025. And I think a big, the catalyst for that tsunami or the rivers reversing and the capital, the tsunami of capital, I think is going to go into podcasting, is the election. I mean, politics are the ultimate in branding. You have a candidate, you have a product, and they need to get 50.1% market share on a given day, and the other person gets zero. It's winner-take-all. It's about messaging, it's about advertising in the right places, and one of the things we learned from Trump... Is cable news is dead and dumb. Knocking on doors makes no fucking sense. It's all about flying into podcasts, straight into podcasts.

• 21:01Scott Galloway?

  And podcasts, MSNBC and cable news, average age of the viewers between 65 and 70, mostly female. I think it's hard to sell those people products unless it's opioid-induced constipation medications, or restless legs, or Life Alert, or reverse mortgage. Whereas the average listener to a podcast is a 34-year-old male, who is more persuadable, who is in his mating years and makes stupid purchases, is buying a home, is forming a family. And whereas 15 years ago, 1 in 10 people had listened to a podcast in the last 30 days, now it's 1 in 2. So this is where the people are going. This is where people who you ordinarily can't reach via ad-supported mediums are going. I mean, this isn't a proxy for advertising, but it's a proxy for influence.

• 21:46Scott Galloway?

  Since the election, all of these individuals who, you know, may or may not be running for president, have reached out to me and want to know my views on things. No, they don't. They want to come on our podcast. And they're running for president, or they're running for senator, and they realize, after watching Trump, I gotta be, the next kingmakers are going to be podcasts. And I think where we're going to get a lot of that capital is from these local news stations or local broadcast stations that have had this unnatural sugar high every two years from political spending, because campaigns are like, old people vote, they watch the local news. So these local news stations lose money 21 months every two years, and then for three

• 22:31Scott Galloway?

  months, they quintuple their ad rates and sell to the, for local and statewide and federal races. I think that capital is about to transition. The water flowed out during the election, and a tsunami is coming in of revenue into podcasting.

• 22:49Ed Elson?

  I think you're going to be the Rush Limbaugh of this next generation on the left. It's going to be great.

• 22:53Scott Galloway?

  That's scary.

• 22:56Ed Elson?

  Which means we're gonna make a lot of money and you're gonna get a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

• 22:59Scott Galloway?

  I like that. Yeah. And, yeah, I don't, I don't, I wasn't a huge fan of Rush. But just in the spirit of transparency, I'm so, I've decided, I was so freaked out by this election, I decided to take a break. I'm like, okay, I've been traumatized by this thing and I'm sick of being coarse and being angry about it. I'm just gonna go dark on politics for a while.

• 23:17Ed Elson?

  What? You do a politics podcast every week?

• 23:20Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, but that's friendly and nice.

• 23:24Ed Elson?

  That makes no sense.

• 23:26Scott Galloway?

  That's me basically asking Jess Tarlov questions because she's actually knows what she's talking about as opposed to me shitposting Trump.

• 23:33Ed Elson?

  Okay, so you're not gonna put your opinions out there?

• 23:36Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it's different, but this medium is gonna, it's gonna be, unfortunately, it's the definition. So kids, this doesn't mean go out and start a podcast. There's 1.6 million podcasts, 600,000 put out regular content. I think 400,000, wait, 600,000 put out something every week. I don't think, I think outside of the top 2 or 300, I don't think it's economically sustainable. Like, the top 10 podcasts are responsible for a third of all downloads. I think the top 100 are responsible for two thirds. So I did the math. There were 2,800,

• 24:14Scott Galloway?

  so 2,800 people have been oarsmen or oarswomen at UCLA, have rowed crew. 10 went to the Olympics. So at 19, when I was on crew at UCLA, I was three times more likely to go to the Olympics than have a self-sustaining podcast.

• 24:31Ed Elson?

  I love that. That's amazing.

• 24:34Scott Galloway?

  Generously, 600 podcasts are self-sustaining economically. That's not to say don't do it. That's not to say it's not worth it. McKinsey probably has 10 podcasts that, you know, highlight their commitment to green energy or whatever it is. Or it's fun, or you enjoy it, or you're building another business, fine. But if you're looking for an independent, self-sustaining business, this is right up there with the likelihood of high school players going to end up in the NBA. It is winner take all at this point.

• 25:02Ed Elson?

  Next up on this list, we've got IPO of 2025, Shein.

• 25:07Scott Galloway?

  I looked at time on site times number of visitors to the site to come up with an attention index. And relative to its most recent round of public funding at $60, $65 billion, it's the best value. And that is, if you look at traffic times the amount of time people spend on the site, it's, it's a great value compared to the market cap of other retailers relative to their valuation and how much time people spend on their site. Also, the growth this year, it's going to surpass. Amazon is the second biggest apparel retailer. Next year, it'll likely surpass Walmart and become the biggest apparel retailer in the world. It's also profitable. It's growing 23, it's growth sold to 23%.

• 25:52Scott Galloway?

  It's going public on the London Exchange. And if you look at the companies that have massively outperformed the market, you can bifurcate them into two categories, capital intensive or IP intensive. So you have Nvidia is in design, they don't own any factories. Intel does, one does about $400,000 per employee, one does 2 million. If you look at Coca-Cola versus Monster, if you look at Marriott versus Airbnb, the IP intensive, low capex company does three to four times the revenue per employee. And the same is true of Shein versus Zara or Inditex, which I think does about $400,000 or $500,000 per employee. And Shein is doing 2 million. It does, you know, the average retailer does about 100 styles a week.

• 26:36Scott Galloway?

  Fashion company, fast fashion does, I think 700 a week. And Shein does something like 7,000 a day. They own no warehouses, no factories, no trucks, no planes, no stores. It's just software. Look using machine learning and AI to anticipate activity on the site and then, excuse me, examine activity on the site and then anticipate and predict demand and then send out those orders to the best factory or best supplier and then put in motion all the transportation. So it's all software. There's no CapEx and those are the companies that have overperformed. I think it's going to get a lot of attention because it's going public on the London Stock Exchange, which will hopefully kind of ignite a moribund market, which has been the London Stock Exchange.

• 27:20Scott Galloway?

  Disclosure, I'm an investor here, but the reason I invested is I think that the IPO market's coming back and despite all the valid concerns about fast fashion and Shein, I think that capitalism and greed will overwhelm any concerns and this will be the IPO of 2025.

• 27:39Ed Elson?

  Question from Doug, but what about tariffs? I.e. let's say Trump does impose tariffs, that seems like a potential risk for Shein.

• 27:46Scott Galloway?

  Well, first off, I think tariffs are not going to be nearly the boogeyman people think they're going to be. I just don't see how, I've said this, I think the moment inflation ticks up and someone says it's because of tariffs or the threat of tariffs, I think they go away. And to a certain extent, the bond market and inflation are the adult supervision now in politics. If Trump wants to run up the deficit and the bond market starts spiking, he's going to roll back those plans. If you look at what happened with the, what was her name, Truss?

• 28:16Ed Elson?

  It's Truss.

• 28:17Scott Galloway?

  Basically what kicked her out of office and what was the ruling party was the bond market and the currency market had said, wait, okay, girlfriend, fine, if you want to have a plan that explodes the deficit, that's your business, but we're going to take interest rates up and your currency down. And overnight she was out of office. And to a certain extent, I think the bond market is sort of the adult in the room with Trump. And that is despite the fact that the Fed's been cutting rates, rates haven't come down a lot because the bond market is worried about potential deficits. The moment he gets anywhere near implementing a tariff on China, anywhere near the time zone of what he's talking about, you're going to see the bond market go up. You're going to see people freak out about inflation.

• 29:02Scott Galloway?

  And the moment inflation ticks up month on month, and people say it's because of the tariffs, they roll these things back. And I believe that companies like Shein and Timu have such an incredible cost advantage. I mean, one of the cost advantages people don't talk about is because the shit's so cheap. You know what is the plague, the nightmare of retail? Returns. If you ship a couch to somebody and they return it, it's right then and there unprofitable. That transaction has gone from making money to losing money. Taking shit back, restocking it, the customer service, cleaning it, and then selling something again, it just makes, turns everything bad. And the percentage of returns is a forward-looking indicator of the margins on the business. It's like churn for a software company.

• 29:47Scott Galloway?

  And these, these companies have almost zero returns because it's like, oh, I don't love it. It doesn't fit. Who cares? It costs $11. So I think that A, the tariffs won't be nearly as bad as people think. And B, I think the margin, the disparity in pricing and the value they offer is so dramatic that I think they could survive a tariff. They're talking about eliminating the loophole around $150 or less. They're not subject to a certain excise tax or tariff. No doubt about it, that'll damage their profitability. But I think they have just such an enormous price disparity to play with. I think they're still going to be fine.

• 30:26Ed Elson?

  Next up, we have business trend of 2025, M&A. Why is that?

• 30:31Scott Galloway?

  Corporations have record profits. They're running out of growth. And if they're in challenged industries, they want to bulk up. You're just going to see tons of M and A here. There's been, M and A has been largely moribund because the Biden administration was enacting more FTC and DOJ reviews, which, by the way, I think was the right thing to do. But you're going to have a much more M and A friendly head of the FTC and the DOJ now. And these companies have so much money on their balance sheets, they're just going to go shopping. And if I were an investment bank, I would be staffing up my M and A group after just a deep freeze of the last several years. I think the bankers and the corporate development folks are like, oh

• 31:12Scott Galloway?

  my gosh, we're, you know, it's open season again. There's a lot of stuff out there that's been beaten up, that's cheap, that we consolidate the backend, and we're not going to have to go through this, this, you know, we're not going to have to pass Chair Khan. So I think M and A is absolutely, is going to boom.

• 31:29Ed Elson?

  And you also predicted that we're going to see the largest take private or buyout in history. Can you say more about that?

• 31:34Scott Galloway?

  Private equity firms have almost $3 trillion in capital that they need to deploy. Some big names have gotten beaten up so badly in the market that I think they're attractive.

• 31:45Ed Elson?

  Such as?

• 31:46Scott Galloway?

  My favorite targets for the biggest take private in history are Boeing, Intel, Nike, Target. These are giant carcasses kind of waiting, I think, to be taken private. I think they would benefit from being taken out of the limelight or the scrutiny of the public markets to make the requisite cost cutting they need to make, or the changes or the investments they need to make. And there's so much money on the sidelines that you could see a club deal assemble the kind of capital you would need to take one of these behemoths private. I think biggest take private in history is going to, is going to happen in 2025.

• 32:28Ed Elson?

  Stay with us.

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• 34:52Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof G Markets. Let's move on to the tech movement of 2025, which is banning phones.

• 34:59Scott Galloway?

  Australia has banned social media for people under the age of 16. New Zealand and Lithuania, I think, are banning phones. States all over, the United States are banning social media and phones in schools. And the evidence is the following. Nobody regrets it. Test scores go up. Student engagement goes up. And, and these tech companies trying to make this bullshit argument like, oh, you're suppressing the, the free speech rights of a 13 year old. What?

• 35:27Ed Elson?

  My favorite is you're suppressing entrepreneurship. Kids get go online and they learn how to sort of get scrappy and make deals.

• 35:35Scott Galloway?

  And meanwhile, every tech executive, the one rule in their house is no one is allowed near these devices until they're 16. This is breaking out all over the world. And whatever I say, you know, I think academia is actually a wonderful career. And I just look at what Professor Hyde has accomplished in the last two years with his book, The Anxious Generation. And he's so reasoned and thoughtful and bipartisan and shows up with so much work and is so measured. He's just having this, he's literally having a, a global impact on the mental health of teens around the world. And I actually, I think it's really, really inspiring, but you're going to see phone bans

• 36:18Scott Galloway?

  and social media bans and age gating break out all over the world. Unfortunately, it's a little late for my kids. One's 14, one's 17. But I think eight and 10 year olds aren't going to have to deal with the same shit that we put up with for the last 15 years.

• 36:34Ed Elson?

  Question from Brian. Would love to hear Scott's thoughts on how we can mobilize Gen X to provide mentoring services to Gen Z.

• 36:41Scott Galloway?

  At the end of every one of my presentations, I talk about, you know, one of our big themes has been how young men are struggling. And I think one of the keys to happiness is that you have guardrails in the forms of relationships. And I think that what really plagues young men in America right now is an absence of relationships.

• 37:01Scott Galloway?

  Women, when they don't have a romantic relationship, will pour that energy into their work or other relationships. They're much better at maintaining a social fabric. And I know this firsthand. If I wasn't in a relationship, I would very rarely go out. I don't like people. I'm lazy. I would stay home and do edibles and watch Netflix all the time and probably die in a couple of years. But my partner forces me to be really social and engage. And that's just really healthy. And I think that's the way it is for a lot of men. And I think young men, where they really come off the rails, is when they lose a male role model. And one of my big, I have the same six slides at the end of every presentation. And that is, I think that men need to take more responsibility for getting involved in the life of a young man

• 37:46Scott Galloway?

  or a boy that isn't theirs. I think that's the ultimate expression of masculinity and success. And you don't have to be a baller. You just have to be living a virtuous life or trying to. Because as a father of two boys, 14 and 17, it's striking how easy it is to add value. No, you should wear shoes if you're going to go to school. Right? A young man, the other day, I got into MIT, but I have a basketball scholarship to Joey Bagadon. It's you, and I'm thinking about taking it. No, go to MIT. Trust me on this. Go to MIT. And then in 30 years, buy a basketball team. It's just kind of showing up and trying to be a good role model and listening and convincing them they have value

• 38:30Scott Galloway?

  because you're taking an interest in their life. And unfortunately, you know, Michael Jackson and the Catholic Church have fucked it up for all of us because there's huge suspicion and a cloud that surrounds you if you become interested in engaging in a young man or a boy's life that isn't yours. Your people have weird suspicions around you. And it's really too bad. In New York, there are three applicants for Big Sisters, or three times as many applicants for Big Sisters of New York as male applicants for Big Brothers. So what do we need to do? We need to create a zeitgeist in our society where a man who is doing well should feel a certain level or a certain obligation.

• 39:12Scott Galloway?

  There's a wonderful zeitgeist in the corporate community that if you're a successful woman, you have an obligation to mentor a younger woman in the organization. That zeitgeist is out there. They have all these mentoring programs. We need that same kind of cultural shift to say that a successful, good man needs to be involved in the life of a young man or a boy. That just is part of our society. And the wonderful thing is, or the easy thing I should say is they are, these young men and these boys are everywhere. You talk to a single mother you're working with, hey, would your son like to come with me to a ballgame? I mean, they are just everywhere, these young men, that especially single mothers are looking for men to engage in their lives.

• 39:55Scott Galloway?

  Or even the sons of your friends, because sometimes, and this is a natural thing, boys, teenage boys, will listen to their dad's friends more than they'll listen to their dad. So I think we need a cultural shift. I think we need more organizations that pair people. And more than anything, though, we need to get past this bullshit of believing that men who have fraternal and paternal love to give, but don't have their own kids, or maybe they do, but they have, they have more resources and more goodwill, that somehow that isn't anything but wonderful. So I think this is an enormous unlock in America. We need, we need to give these young men more role models and more relationships.

• 40:38Scott Galloway?

  And also just a recognition that you don't have to be an amazing dude. You just have to be a nice man trying to live a good life.

• 40:46Ed Elson?

  And that brings us to our final prediction. And this is a first for the Prof G predictions deck. We have a chemical of 2025, and that chemical is testosterone.

• 40:56Scott Galloway?

  Well, other than I'm sticking it in my ass every seven days. I don't know if you noticed the hair on my eyeballs. Oh my God. Brought to you by Blue Chewables.

• 41:08Ed Elson?

  Let's get to why this is the chemical of 2025 versus hairy eyeballs and erections.

• 41:13Scott Galloway?

  Everyone thought this was, this year was going to be, or this election was going to be a referendum on women's rights. It wasn't. It was a referendum, I believe, on young people not doing well, specifically young men. And if you look at the cohort that most aggressively shifted from blue to red, it was people under the age of 30. And if you're not doing well, you're not doing well as your parents, which is, that's the first time that's happened in our nation's history. You don't want change. You don't even want disruption. You want chaos. I'm making as much money as my parents are my age. I don't have, I don't have many prospects. Groceries have gone up. I can't afford my rent. I haven't had a raise. And yeah, I don't want incumbents are being kicked out everywhere around the world. It's a function of inflation and social media that convinces everyone to hate everyone

• 41:56Scott Galloway?

  else and hate the incumbents. But what did Trump do? He flew into the manosphere. He said, he basically picked the highest T podcast, whether it was Rogan or Theo Von or

• 42:08Ed Elson?

  The Nelk Boys, Aiden Ross.

• 42:10Scott Galloway?

  Flew right into it. MSNBC, 70 year old woman, I don't give a shit. Fox, 140 year old men, I don't care. I am flying straight into testosterone or testosterone, excuse me. And granted, I'm the hammer that everything I see is a nail. But the second group that showed one of the biggest pivots from blue to red was 45 to 64 year old women. And I believe that that's their mothers. But there's just no getting around it. It was a brilliant strategy. And so this is, I think this continues into this year. I think this is the year of testosterone.

• 42:44Ed Elson?

  That does it for our predictions for 2025. We do have one last prediction here from one of our listeners. This is from Evan. His prediction for 2025, Ed Elson creates own independent media network. Scott, your reactions to Evan's prediction?

• 43:00Scott Galloway?

  Well, sure. So there's also a prediction that property enterprises sues the shit out of Ed Elson. Now, we've had such a good year, in large part because of your efforts and the efforts of Claire. And all of the other good folks at Prof G, and I'm not going to remember all of them. So I'm not going to even try and list them all. But greatness is in the agency of others. And we have just had such a wonderful year. And it's also, it's super exciting. It's hard a time I give you. I love the fact that we're creating more voices, especially young voices. You're, what are you, 25? 25. I mean, think about how remarkable that is. When I was 22, you can't understand, you're going to look back on this and you're going

• 43:43Scott Galloway?

  to think, how on earth did I not only achieve this, but also get this opportunity? When I was 25, I was living at home with my mother, trying to figure out if I should go to business school. And that was, that was my accomplishment. You know, occasionally, you know, I mean, I got, occasionally I would get like seven, seven stamps on my subway card, my subway, you know, restaurant card. That was my big kind of accomplishment was anyways, my point is I didn't, I hadn't gotten anywhere near your achievements at this age. And also our, our crew is so young. And the fact that we can build a media company with so few people, it's just been exceptionally rewarding.

• 44:27Scott Galloway?

  Going back to these feelings of being paternal, one of the most rewarding things about 2024 for me was seeing all these young people in our organization do well and be able to pay them well because we're in the right place at the right time and we're executing well. But I'm, I'm encouraging everybody and I'm also trying to encourage myself to stop at the end of the year and take pause and reflect. And first and foremost, I don't have ask answer yet. So that's, that's key. But also just how rewarding it is to work with so many talented young people who are building something. I'm really, I've had such a wonderful year. So thanks to everyone at Prof G, yourself included. This has been so rewarding. And Catherine, my business partner here, we just consistently, we've built companies

• 45:08Scott Galloway?

  together and we're like, it's just so rewarding to build something that's of a similar or greater success than our other companies with like 90% less fucking brain damage and drama.

• 45:20Ed Elson?

  It's coming. It's coming. Once the money comes in, the drama's coming too.

• 45:23Scott Galloway?

  There you go. But thank you, Ed. You're you're an impressive young man. Thank you, Claire, the producer here. She's just done an amazing job. I feel so fortunate and blessed to be. People ask me, where do you get information? I'm like, I have a bunch of muses called young people I work with who inform me, update me, give me just a better view of the world. But yeah, I feel very, I feel very fortunate to be in this seat and to be surrounded by so many talented young people. So.

• 45:52Ed Elson?

  It's, yeah. Thank you, Scott. This has been an incredible year. I've loved it. And I'm very excited for 2025. I think it's just gonna be incredible. I think we're gonna do amazing things. And I hope people keep listening and I hope they keep watching and I hope they tell their friends to listen to this podcast because I've said it to you before. But I'll say again, I think we've got the best podcast on the market and I hope the audience agrees. So I'm very excited for the year ahead.

• 46:17Scott Galloway?

  Uh, word.

• 46:20Ed Elson?

  Word, son.

• 46:21Scott Galloway?

  Word, my little brother slash stepchild I inherited from my seventh marriage.

• 46:28Ed Elson?

  This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Allison Weiss. Mia Silverio is our research lead. Jessica Lang is our research associate. Drew Burrows is our technical director and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Join us on Thursday for our conversation with Ramit Sethi, only on Prof G Markets.

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