Why Millennials Are Doing Worse Than Their Parents - Scott Galloway

Scott Galloway is a clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, a public speaker, entrepreneur and an author. Millennials are the first generation who have not done better than their parents. Educational outcomes, finances, home ownership, mental health and marriage rates are all thrown up in the air. Why has this happened and what can we do about it? Expect to learn why covid worsened the wealth gap more than it already was, why TikTok is a trojan stallion which should be banned, why news pundits suck so much, what makes a news story go viral, Scott's advice to young people on how to maximise effectiveness in life, the most important things to focus on in order to be happy and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 15% discount on all VERSO’s products at https://ver.so/modernwisdom (use code: MW15) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Adrift - https://amzn.to/3eO29zq Check out Scott's website - https://www.profgalloway.com/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #scottgalloway #wealth #dating - 00:00 Intro 00:22 Are Young People Worse Off Than Their Parents? 07:10 How TikTok Has Been Weaponised 19:19 Why Lonely Men Are Dangerous 28:09 Is Technology Sedating Men? 36:05 The Integrity of News Pundits 42:53 Society’s Problems of Super-abundance 52:35 Scott’s Advice to People in their 30’s 1:01:02 Where to Find Scott - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Scott Galloway?

  We're eating each other in the US internally. A third of Republicans and Democrats see members of the other party as their mortal enemy. 25% of America is comfortable with an autocrat as long as the autocrat represents his or her ideals. 54% of Democrats are worried that their kid is going to marry a Republican. And so the fastest way to defeat an enemy is atomize them.

• 0:20Chris Williamson?

  In the 1950s, a young person had a 90% chance of out-earning their parents. Now it's a 50% chance. Only half of millennials are earning more than its parents. Since 1989, people under the age of 40 have seen their share of the nation's wealth plummet from 19% to 9%. And for the first time in US history, young people are no longer better off economically than their parents were at the same age. Nice, positive headlines to get us started today. Where did you learn that?

• 0:51Scott Galloway?

  Well, first off, it's great to be with you. But the way you mentioned that for the first time in our nation's history, a 30-year-old man or woman isn't doing as well as his or her parents. That's kind of a great breakdown in what is the fundamental compact between a society and its populace. And that is if you play by the rules and you're a good person and you work hard, your kids will do better than you. That's kind of what you want. Anyone who has kids knows you're only as least happy as your least happy kid. And if your kids, on average, aren't doing as well as you, it means to have kids in a nation means your life is going to go, is going to, your life is going to degrade emotionally and psychologically, which means society no longer works for you.

• 1:35Scott Galloway?

  And we got to hope it's temporary. But that's the bad news. The good news is, depending on how you look at it, this is a problem of our own making. You mentioned that the wealth of people under the age of 40, as registered by their percentage of GDP, has been cut in half. And there's this illusion of complexity that the incumbents

• 1:56Scott Galloway?

  Will try and foment among media and the populace to explain why these very intractable problems are intractable. And they're not. When we, the two biggest tax deductions in America that we have passed and we have decided makes sense are mortgage interest and capital gains. Who owns home and owns stocks? People my age and older. Who rents and makes their money working? People your age and younger. So we've effectively decided that the two biggest tax cuts hit further and rich, the wealthiest generation in history, and that is US baby boomers. If we look at the biggest transfer of wealth that's recurring in the world, it's a transfer of wealth of one and a half trillion dollars from people of working age in the United

• 2:41Scott Galloway?

  States to people of retirement age in the form of social security. And again, that cohort receiving a trillion and a half dollar transfer payment from young people are the wealthiest cohort in the history of the planet. So education skyrocketing, a regressive tax, I mean, you can just go on and on and on. This isn't an accident. This isn't forces greater than us. These are deliberate decisions, mostly because old people vote, mostly because presidential politics start in Iowa and Maine, the two oldest whitest states in the nation. And what do you know? We have a society that tilts capital away from your generation to mine.

• 3:21Scott Galloway?

  And it is, it's dumb, it's short sighted, and it's also morally corrupt. And there's, it just goes on and on and on. Education. When I applied to school in the eighties to college, the admissions rate was 76%. The tuition was $1,200 a year. That same school, the admissions rate is 6% and the tuition is closer to 30,000 a year. So everything we've done has sort of stacked the deck. It's sort of, baby boomers have decided, heads I win, tails you lose.

• 3:53Chris Williamson?

  Did the baby boomers overachieve? Or are millennials and zoomers underachieving? Or is it a combination of the two? You've said that they were the wealthiest ever. Did they get a disproportionate gain during that period, the boomers?

• 4:09Scott Galloway?

  So I think a lot of people will try and create this trope of the quiet quitting, expectant, lazy millennial or Gen Z. And I don't think there's any evidence of that. I think that you could argue they're more socially conscious. I think work from home probably creates more temptation to spend more time with your dogs and maybe working all the time. But the kids, and there's some proximity bias here. The kids that come out of my class at NYU, the kids I work with at Prodigy Media, are more impressive every year. And they work very hard. What has changed is that housing's more expensive for them, schooling's more expensive for them, and a lot of their taxes have gone up. And my

• 4:52Scott Galloway?

  life has gotten easier as I've gotten older. So I don't, in terms of the baby boomers, I don't think have outperformed. I think they've been fairly lucky. They came of age during the greatest economic boom of history. You know, the last, basically the last 13 years have been incredible, and the last 40 have been pretty remarkable in terms of prosperity. But what the baby boomers have done a great job of is ensuring that when there's a pandemic and we need massive relief, it doesn't go to poor or young people, it goes to older wealthy people. Two-thirds of the PPP program ended up in the top quintile of household income earners. So we've basically done a great job of kind of weaponizing governments

• 5:35Scott Galloway?

  and creating what I call this really dangerous rejectionist exclusionary society, where it's, once I have a college degree, I'm going to encourage my university to pull up the gates and applaud the dean when admissions rates go down. And the university rankings love this exclusionary kind of luxury brand positioning. Once I have a house, once I buy a house, I find the money to get a house, I try and make it more difficult for other houses to be built. I show up to local board meetings and community meetings and I make it difficult to approve any additional housing. Once I have a tech company that's working, I spend more and more money on lobbying to ensure that I can abuse my monopoly position and ensure small companies don't get out of the crib. So it's this rejectionist exclusionary

• 6:20Scott Galloway?

  culture. That has emerged, that's turned America or morphed America from what was the best place to get rich into the best place to stay rich. There's very little churn here. Most of the pandemic programs, if you think about it, were some loaves of bread and circuses thrown for the poor, all creating cloud cover around the majority of the capital, ended up in the market, which shot asset prices up. Ninety percent of stocks are owned, ninety percent of real estate by dollar volumes owned by the top one percent. It was really just cloud cover to ensure that Nana and Pop Pop could upgrade their cruise cabins. And so I think these are deliberate, this is the bad news. We've deliberately taken

• 7:02Scott Galloway?

  money from young people and transferred it to old people. The good news is that if we can make it happen, we can unmake it. All of these problems are solvable.

• 7:11Chris Williamson?

  Give me your thoughts on TikTok. I know that you dug into some of the research around that, the way that it's been weaponized, and also the impact that it's having on young people.

• 7:21Scott Galloway?

  So let me just start off by saying I love TikTok. I think it's an extraordinary product. I think it was genius to take a platform and say, it shouldn't be social. It's not about what your friends think about you. It's not about choices. It's not about finding anything you want, like YouTube. It's not about, you know, feeling bad about yourself because you don't have a six-pack or you're not as rich as your friends on Instagram. It's about a streaming media platform where there's no choice. You have one choice. You tap the logo and it immediately starts calibrating based on what you like, what you swipe up, swipe down on. And before you know it, you're in the ultimate tailored, individualized, singular streaming media network that is just addictive. It's just, I could go onto TikTok right now and for a couple hours just watch it. I think my

• 8:04Scott Galloway?

  twelve-year-old boy, if he had his way, would disappear into his room with his phone, put diapers on so we could watch TikTok for seventy-two hours straight and not have a bathroom break. I think this thing is an amazing product.

• 8:17Scott Galloway?

  The issue is, if I were a member of the CCP and I saw that we had vested interests in diminishing America's standing strategically in the world, and that the easiest way to do that was not with kinetic power, because we don't have the capital that the US has to spend on aircraft carrier fleets, or even through corporate espionage, and they do a great job of that, I would just take my thumb and very elegantly and insidiously put it on the scales of content that reflects America in a bad light. So whether you're Kim Kardashian, or Joe Rogan, or Jonathan Haidt, a lot of your content reflects America in a very positive light. And a lot of your content highlights the problems we have. It would be very easy, I believe they're doing this now, I think they'd be stupid

• 9:02Scott Galloway?

  not to do this, and put their thumb on the scale of content that says our elections are being weaponized, racism in the US has not gotten better, it's gotten worse, that capitalism does not work, that you can't trust your leaders, and slowly but surely raise a generation of Americans, of civic leaders, military leaders, business leaders, that feel bad about America, and also aren't focused on the humans' rights violations in China. But basically, you know, if you think of geopolitics as a horror movie, it's not, it's not outside threats right now. We are stronger than we've ever been, I would argue, competitively. No one's lining up for Chinese or Russian vaccines, our GDP

• 9:45Scott Galloway?

  growth hasn't matched China's, but it's more consistent. The smartest, brightest, hardest-working people in the world all have one thing in common, and that is, they like the idea of either getting to Europe, or getting to the United States especially. So we're the football team that gets the top draft choices every year from every high school in the world. So we're doing really well. But the horror movie would be that horror movie where they say the call is coming from inside the house. We're eating each other in the US internally. A third of Republicans and Democrats see the other party, members of the other party as their mortal enemy. 25% of America is comfortable with an autocrat, as long as the autocrat represents his or her ideals. 54% of Democrats are worried that their kid is going to marry a Republican.

• 10:26Scott Galloway?

  And so the fastest way to atomize or the fastest way to defeat an enemy is atomize them. And I think TikTok, when you have kids under the age of 18, spending more time on TikTok than they spend on every streaming media company combined, would we be comfortable with Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, HBO Max, all being owned by China? And I don't think we would. So I think there needs to be a separation between ownership and the product. I think that Meta was the ultimate espionage product. I don't think the Mossad, the NSA, the GRU, MI6, and their wildest dreams could have come up with Meta. And I think we're going to find out that our ability to take out some of these Taliban leaders has been a function of their niece being on Instagram, we GPS drone them.

• 11:12Scott Galloway?

  And I also, and I realize this sounds paranoid, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong. I think after the senators and elected leaders in America have their photo ops berating Mark Zuckerberg, they go into a confidential hearing and he says, do you want us to continue help killing Taliban leaders? And they say, yes. And he says, well, back the fuck off. I think that's why we haven't had any meaningful legislation against the big American platforms. But anyways, the ultimate propaganda tool is TikTok. I just don't, I think they would be stupid not to do this. And I think we're naive to think that they won't be able to do it easily. And I think we should, I think it presents a real national security risk.

• 11:46Chris Williamson?

  The wild thing is that TikTok content that is disintegrating America or reducing patriotic feelings towards it is generated by US citizens.

• 11:58Scott Galloway?

  In America.

• 11:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, this isn't, this isn't the Chinese creating content.

• 12:02Scott Galloway?

  No.

• 12:02Chris Williamson?

  But because of the dynamic of audience capture and the reinforcement mechanism of getting that status response, you can press your hand on the scale that rewards creators that create a particular type of narrative. And that it turns every individual TikTok user that cares to talk about politics to be more likely an unwitting, unwilling CCP agent.

• 12:27Scott Galloway?

  It's so brilliant and insidious at the same time. And by the way, let's wrap all of this in really joyous dance videos, which makes it all feel really benign.

• 12:36Chris Williamson?

  It was done to a Justin Bieber. The catastrophe and the apocalypse will be done to a Justin Bieber soundtrack.

• 12:42Scott Galloway?

  That's right.

• 12:42Chris Williamson?

  It doesn't really matter.

• 12:43Scott Galloway?

  It all feel good. And you don't even have to put your thumb on the scale of certain individuals and not others. It can be the content from the same individual. In this podcast, I will talk about very hopeful things for America. You know, I don't think there's anything wrong. We can't fix. We 50% of the world's philanthropy originates from US institutions. Yeah, we, if you were to have one global headline, news headline for the last 100 years would be that British Russians and the Americans turned back fascism. The one headline for the last 50 years would be unprecedented global prosperity led by America. I'll also talk about failing young men in the US and how they're struggling and they've never done, young men have never followed.

• 13:27Scott Galloway?

  That cohort has fallen further faster in the US than in history. If you're TikTok and you have a series of 30 seconds, 30 second clips and you're with a CCP, which narrative do you want to see rolling more often? And it's just super, super easy. They could just take, they don't need any, they don't need to produce their own content. They just need to tweak the algorithm to say, in the same 60 minutes, an individual will have pro and anti-American content. And we're just going to slowly but surely dial up the anti-American content. And it's from, it's from someone you trust. It's from someone who also has pro-American content. So you think their content is credible. Let's create a lot of doubt about the efficacy of the vaccines.

• 14:09Scott Galloway?

  When there's, there's thoughtful discourse on both sides, I would argue 90 plus percent of the thoughtful discourse about vaccines says on a risk adjusted basis, you should get a vaccine. And then 10% or less is doctors saying it alters your DNA.

• 14:26Scott Galloway?

  Well, if I'm the CCP and I want to create controversy and I want to get us hating each other more, let's make that content 50/50. Let's have everyone go at each other over the vaccines. So I would say, just quite frankly, if I were them, that's what I would do. Why spend money on aircraft carriers? Why compete on 11 playing field when we have this Trojan horse the size of Montana residing in the US and we have this vehicle that the upcoming generation of Americans love and just a few small tweaks and slowly but surely, they won't even know. The movie The Sting, I don't know if you saw it with Robert Redford

• 15:07Scott Galloway?

  and Paul Newman, but the key to a great con is the mark never knows they were conned. We're all victims of propaganda right now. We all see on the left and on the right that sways our view, but we don't think we've been fooled. It's much easier to fool someone than convince them they've been fooled. Because to acknowledge you've been fooled is like saying, I acknowledge I'm an ass. I'm acknowledged someone's gotten the better of me. And people don't like that. So I think it's happening now and I don't think we know what's even happening to us.

• 15:37Chris Williamson?

  We also don't know what's happening in China. I don't know how much truth is behind this, but I've heard that the Chinese algorithm on TikTok shows a very different sort of world. It's young Chinese people doing engineering and being smart and conscientious and admirable and patriotic. Another consideration is 9.6 trillion minutes of Netflix watched in 2021, 22.6 trillion minutes of TikTok watched in 2021. Given the fact that a TikTok video at most can be 60 seconds and probably the average Netflix thing is 30 minutes, that blows my mind.

• 16:20Scott Galloway?

  It's staggering. And to your point, the TikTok version, the Chinese version of TikTok, and it's Duyin, it's all aspirational. Look at this kid from Shenzhen who's a concert pianist. Look at the incredible research we're doing. Look at these kids, what they're building in their in their high school. It's all uplifting. No politics, none at all. So this is what the Chinese have decided they want their youth to see.

• 16:51Chris Williamson?

  Could that not be an argument that in China, talking about the CCP in any way that's not positive would be difficult to do, no matter how you put your finger on the balance of the of the platform? They have a broader structure that stops people from doing that?

• 17:06Scott Galloway?

  100%. And some people would argue they shouldn't be our role model. But even if you take, even if you take the societal issues and the complicated conversation around censorship in media, because whenever you hear the words ban and media in the same sentence, you should understandably have a gag reflex, because I think one of the keys to a productive democratic society is that pretty much anyone can say pretty much anything about pretty much anyone else. I do think that's super important. But take that, push that aside. Should Chinese sectors and companies have unfettered access to our markets when we have absolutely none to theirs? Twitter, Google, Meta, what's our access over there? Zero. We have limited

• 17:50Scott Galloway?

  access. We have just enough access initially, and they create body language and a head fake that they might let us be in there, just long enough so that they can steal the intellectual property. They then prop up a local entrepreneur, fund that local entrepreneur, and their attitude is, we can steal the Google algorithm, or create something, a reasonable facsimile, and there's probably a $200 or $300 billion company. Search engine that can just feed off the domestic market. What do you know? It's Baidu. Why on earth are we going to go the Western way and go do what Italy or South Korea does and let our newspapers go out of business and let all of the shareholder value transfer to California? I mean, you got to admire them. From a Chinese standpoint, it's smart.

• 18:33Chris Williamson?

  It's really, really. Meanwhile, they're limiting the amount of time that their children can play video games. One hour between eight and nine PM Friday, Saturday, Sunday per week. That's it. The only way that you can play games is through a streaming service. The streaming service just click the switch. It's just not on. You can't do it. Meanwhile, you have men that are being given fakes fitness cues and their conscientiousness and desire for aspiration and chasing goals is being repurposed across into League of Legends or whatever other game they're now playing online. They are able to get uncanny vulvas from porn. So they're being given fake reproductive fitness signals from porn, fake achievement

• 19:14Chris Williamson?

  fitness signals from video games. This is why. So you've got a quote that I found very interesting. So I had Richard Reeves on the show recently of Boys and Men, brand new book, which is out and it's really interesting. You said, "The most dangerous person in the world is a man who's broken and alone." What do you mean by that?

• 19:31Scott Galloway?

  Well, first off, let me acknowledge, I had shudders go down my spine when I saw that my book was coming out, the same book as Richard's book. I think that guy is amazing.

• 19:41Chris Williamson?

  He's a beast.

• 19:42Scott Galloway?

  And I have been feeling and seeing this notion of how poorly young men are doing. I just can see it in my friends with their sons. I have friends who have two daughters and a son. And I'm saying this metaphorically, but loosely speaking, the daughters at Penn, the younger daughters working at a PR firm in Chicago, and the son is in their basement vaping and playing video games. Young men, seven to 10 high school valedictorians or girls, for every one male college graduate over the next five years, there's going to be two female college graduates. Ninety-three percent of mass shooters are men, three times more likely to overdose,

• 20:23Scott Galloway?

  four times more likely to commit suicide, twelve more times more likely to be incarcerated. They do worse in single-parent households. For some reason, girls have the same outcomes in a dual-parent household versus a single. We have more single-parent households. Our education system is biased against men. Men on a behavior-adjusted, or boys on a behavior-adjusted voice is twice as likely to get suspended for the same infraction as a girl. Two-thirds to eighty percent of all primary and secondary teachers are women, and understandably, they're going to champion little girls who they see themselves in. So, young men just have the deck stacked against them. If you walk down the avenue that is America, one in three men under the age of thirty will not have had sex in the last year. And people hear

• 21:08Scott Galloway?

  the word sex and their brain fires different ways. But sex is a key step to the elemental foundation of any society, and that's a relationship. And then you rap in COVID, you rap in the biological fact that men's prefrontal cortex doesn't evolve as quickly. They're more immature. And then you have all this, this kind of short-form ability to get similar dopa of relationships on social, similar dopa that you're learning or taking risks with Robin Hood or gambling. You're not learning. You're not investing. You're gambling. And it's fun, but it's gambling. You don't have to put on a shirt or figure out the skills to meet women because you can get some of that hit by watching porn. I mean, what's your motivation

• 21:53Scott Galloway?

  to go out and go through the humiliation of dating to get to your own sex when you get a sort of a reasonable facsimile of it at home? What's your rationale for working hard and delaying gratification when you keep seeing these screenshots of men who've made twelve thousand percent return on Solana? So, and men aren't good at executive functions. They're kind of two years behind. An eighteen-year-old boy applying to college is sort of on par with a sixteen- or a seventeen-year-old girl, or put another way.

• 22:26Chris Williamson?

  Did you see Paige Harden published a study looking at the comparative levels of impulse control between boys and girls? So you can imagine there's a graph over time in terms of impulse control. The time is going along the bottom. You've got two lines that are both male and female. For a male to have the same level of impulse control as a ten-year-old girl, they need to be twenty-four.

• 22:51Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, the delta I've heard, that's striking. The delta I've heard is two years. But even if you think about two years, you basically, if you have two eighteen-year-old people applying to college, basically the eighteen-year-old is competing against the sixteen-year-old. So imagine, imagine you're in tenth grade applying to college and all the girls are in twelfth grade. That's, that's what we're facing right now. And at NYU, I can tell you that some of the schools there, if they were totally applicant-blind, it would not only be predominantly female, they'd be seventy percent Asian female. I mean, the Asian community has been so successful in our society as it, as it comes to producing traits and behaviors that colleges love. And people think, well, okay, if, if men, if men are finally not doing

• 23:36Scott Galloway?

  very well. I mean, we basically, we leveled the playing field about education and what we found is women just absolutely blew by men. Just absolutely blew by. And you think, well, what's the problem with that? Well, when it was forty-sixty female to, female to male, we decided to do something about it with Title IX and affirmative action. And we leveled up women. Now that it's forty-sixty, or you could even argue thirty-three sixty-six in terms of graduation, because men drop out, the question is, well, are we concerned now? And the, the knock-on effect here is that...

• 24:09Scott Galloway?

  Getting a college degree is still a really good Plan B for economic security. On average, over the course of your lifetime, a college grad will make about double what a non-college grad makes. And so what you have is women mate socio-economically horizontally and up, men horizontally and down. The bottom line is women with college degrees aren't interested in mating with men without college degrees. So you have this, what I'll call, Porsche polygamy effect. And that is when you take the chaser of online dating, which is doing the same thing that technology does to every sector, is consolidating it and creating a winner-take-most environment. The top 10% of men in terms of attractiveness on Tinder get 80, 90% of the swipe rights. They get all of the attention, which quite frankly doesn't lead to a lot of great behavior.

• 24:54Scott Galloway?

  Too much opportunity is not necessarily a good thing. The 50 to 90 percentile in terms of attractiveness from men do okay, and the bottom 50% are just totally shut out. And what happens to these men who are totally shut out from mating opportunities? They lose confidence, they start becoming much more prone to misogynistic content with these internet celebrities telling them it's not their fault, it's a woman's fault. They become less likely to believe in climate change, they become more nationalist. I mean, young men are very good at blaming other people when things aren't going well for them. And so what do the most violent, dangerous societies all have in common? They all have a disproportionate number of the most dangerous person on the planet, a young, broken, alone man, and we're just producing way too many of them.

• 25:36Scott Galloway?

  And we can't even have an honest conversation about it because the moment you start evangelizing for young men, the moment you're seen as quote-unquote "pro-young man," the natural assumption is that means you're anti-women, because admittedly, there's some guys out there on TikTok claiming to be trying to give men confidence, that basically, it's basically thinly veiled misogyny. Yes. Referring to women as bitches, and you gotta own the bitches, and you gotta get out there, take my class for $49 a month, and you'll get the money and put the bitches in their place. You're like, Jesus Christ! Yeah. That's what young men are susceptible to. It's really, it's dangerous and it's ugly. So I think a lot about masculinity.

• 26:19Scott Galloway?

  I think we need, I think the left needs to take back masculinity. And one of the things I enjoy doing on the podcast, I'm a profane vulgar person. And for some reason, profanity and vulgarity has been conflated with some sort of non-progressive person. No, it's not. Comedians who've been really profane and vulgar tend to be more progressive. Masculinity is a wonderful thing. It's not necessarily the domain of people born men, but advocating for others, protecting others, using skills and strengths to protect other people, you know, being aggressive, that is a wonderful thing. When Russians come pouring over the border in Ukraine, you want some of that big dick energy. Masculinity is a wonderful thing and it should be embraced. And to conflate toxicity and masculinity is bad for society.

• 27:02Scott Galloway?

  And we've gotten to a point where we don't value young men. We're not giving them as many opportunities as we're giving older generations, much less other young women. And it's a, I think it's an existential crisis for the United States. And you know who wants more emotionally, economically viable men? Women. And women have a much finer filter for mating than men. And they're just not finding that many good young men. They're just, we aren't producing enough of them.

• 27:27Chris Williamson?

  It doesn't surprise me that it's a confusing situation to be in. Men are being told to both man up and open up, but to avoid being toxically masculine. But when you see the revealed preferences versus stated preferences of the way that women date, that guys should get over their fear of tall women when Zendaya and Tom Holland got into a relationship together. It's like, I don't think that short guys were turning down Zendaya. I think that it's the other way around. On average, women want a partner that's 21 centimeters taller than them. On average, men want a partner that's 16 centimeters shorter than they are. So I, all of that is something that everyone listening to the show will be very familiar with. This mating crisis that we're seeing at the moment is something that I've been very passionate about.

• 28:09Chris Williamson?

  Something that Richard talked to me about last week when I was on the show is young male syndrome. Why have we not got these swaths, roving gangs of young disaffected youths, youth guys pushing over granny and causing havoc and stuff like that? That hasn't happened. That, that just doesn't seem to be happening. Yes, you've got school shooters. They are individual groups. Yes, the Salman Rushdie thing again as well was also an individual lone actor, probably somebody that had he had been more integrated into a family and into his local community would have been less likely to commit that sort of an act. But we haven't seen it en masse in the same sort of way. You're correct with what you say, between 2008, 2018, men went from 8% to 28% the number of men that haven't had sex in the last year.

• 28:51Chris Williamson?

  However, we haven't seen this proliferation of young male syndrome occurring. And Richard's contention was that the fake fitness cues that you're getting from technology are sedating men, they're repurposing some of that energy that they would have put into being very aggressive out into the world. And as opposed to us going out with a bang, we're going out with a fizzle. And from what I see, the sort of rhetoric that I hear online from men, it is a lot less, I'm going to go out and do something about this. It is a lot more, I'm going to retreat in to me, just hold on tight, boys, the sex robots are coming soon.

• 29:36Chris Williamson?

  Like, these are non-ironic comments that I see on the internet. So I think this is a bit of availability bias, because it's something new that I've just learned about, so I'm all excited about it, and it seems to explain stuff. But I do think that there is a very good argument to be made that you're not going to end up with dangerous men, you're going to end up with useless men.

• 29:56Scott Galloway?

  I think that's fascinating. I mean, everything you're saying, I'm kind of trying to take mental notes, because we always go back to history, right? And in early 30s Germany, it looked more like the US than we'd like to admit. It was prosperous, it had a thriving LGBT community, and then when it was economically harmed, the young men weren't doing well, they found scapegoats. And you're right, they put on brown shirts and they started, you know, mistreating old people, and you're not seeing that in the United States. What I would argue, though, is that we're electing people who are doing it in a more insidious fashion, and that is...

• 30:32Scott Galloway?

  There's been more women, all elected, almost all elected representatives have a college degree. So, to a certain extent, our elected representatives should somewhat mimic college grads. That's the one thing they all have in common. Almost all of them went to college. For forty years now, we've been producing more female college graduates than male college graduates, which would lead you to understandably believe there should be more female elected leaders than male elected leaders. There's not. Twenty-eight percent of our elected leaders are female. And I think it's because men and women incorrectly conflate the tone of your voice and your height with leadership qualities. So, show me a woman who's five-three and has an IQ of one-thirty, and I'll show you school board president. Show me a guy who's six-two with a full head of hair who has a hundred-and-five IQ, I'll show you a senator.

• 31:16Scott Galloway?

  And what you have is, is a group of men, and our parties are now bifurcating, and the Democrats are representing female college graduates, and Republicans are representing non-college graduate males. And I think some of the rhetoric coming out of Washington that feels a little bit, especially on the right, feels a little bit like fascist light, and you see the Italian, new Italian prime minister, that it's a different type of repackaged violence. It's violence against immigrants. It's slow-burned violence against women in the form of taking their rights back to old Spain. So, it's not as obvious as a gang of young men going into the streets and beating up on vulnerable people.

• 31:59Scott Galloway?

  I think in some ways, it's more institutionalized, where we elect people who say things they don't even believe because they know that they have a powerful voting group in young disaffected males. And I think they're overrepresented in Washington, actually. When you look at our, if you look at the United States, we have minority rule. And that's on the left, far left and far right because of gerrymandering. But about thirty percent of our senators represent about five percent of our population, and those senators tend to represent conservative districts. And those conservative districts are producing all of these kind of young, uneducated men who are looking for scapegoats, looking for, to blame immigrants, not being as concerned

• 32:44Scott Galloway?

  about climate change, not being as protective of women's rights. So, I think that, I think the violence is still there, it's just being repackaged. But to your point, just as cancer was an epidemic that we finally started talking about, not an epidemic, but it was closeted and we had open conversations about that and made it normalized it to talk about it. I mean, huge progress against it because we normalized the conversation. We're going through the same thing with mental illness. People are openly talking about their own mental illness challenges and it's a wonderful thing and it'll help normalize it and address it. I think that the next thing that's going to come out of the closet is the crisis in loneliness. And that is, I think, so many people, Boy Scout and Girl Scout enrollment is way down. The percentage of people who

• 33:29Scott Galloway?

  talk to their neighbors is way down. The percentage of people who play in an athletic league, play sports, see their friends every day, have a good friend. The number of people who say they have a good friend has declined by a third in the last 10 years. The number of kids who see their friends every day has been cut in half over the last 10 years. And it shows that loneliness raises your blood pressure, increases the likelihood you'll have a stroke, increases the likelihood of depression. And for young men especially, it's important because if you don't have friends, if you don't have a girlfriend, I joined a fraternity when I was 17 years old. Exactly 40 years ago this week, I rushed a fraternity at UCLA. And there's a cartoon of fraternities and there's a lot of bad things about them. I would encourage any young man to join a fraternity if he goes to college because it took a 30,000 person community and it shrank it down to something

• 34:14Scott Galloway?

  manageable for me. And I remember my roommate saying, "Stop smoking so much pot." I remember my roommate saying, you know, "Oh, you're on crew or you want to row for crew." I had other male role models. The difference between a 22-year-old male who I was friends with and an 18-year-old was huge. And there were men, young men on the crew team at 22. I wanted a bro crew. And so they mentored me and worked out with me and, you know, and I got much more fit. I needed that socialization. I needed those guardrails. I needed other men to tell me to get my shit together. I didn't grow up with siblings. My father wasn't around. Young men, there are now neighborhoods where there are no men. I mean, just none, especially in black neighborhoods because of incarceration rates and male abandonment. And what's really interesting is I think we should think about really unconventional

• 34:59Scott Galloway?

  experiments. In New York and New Jersey, because of COVID, we had big prison relief programs because COVID just ripped through the prisons because most of these prisoners had not been exposed to any novel coronaviruses or coronaviruses. So they just were, it just ripped through. So they had a prison release program. And what they found was the communities that absorbed the most men from a prison release program, crime went down. Because what they found is in general, these men would speak to younger men and say, "Don't fuck up like I did."

• 35:29Scott Galloway?

  And so this absence of men, this absence of male role models, the moment a kid doesn't have, a boy doesn't have a male role model in his life, he becomes immediately twice as likely to be incarcerated.

• 35:39Scott Galloway?

  So this numbing of America, this loneliness epidemic, and this lack of male role models, I think is a big deal. But I love the way, it's really interesting, I want to do more research on what you just said, that they're not as external a bigger threat, they're more of a threat to themselves.

• 35:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Scott Galloway?

  And you're right, it may be just that they're more dangerous to themselves than to others.

• 35:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, so much to go through there. I think one of the interesting things when it comes to controlling reproductive independence for women, it seems like women are mostly the enactors of control when it comes to that. If it was left up to men, women's abortion rights would have almost certainly not been touched, based on a bunch of polling that I've seen. That might be interesting for you to look at if you've not seen it before as well. A ton of polls seem to suggest that men are less enforcing when it comes to this than women are, that women tend to be the people that are voting pro-life as opposed to pro-choice. That was something surprising that I learned about.

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, I mean, all of this together is a very messy situation in a mal-adapted, evolutionary mismatched world, filled with novel technology that can not only propagate ideas, but allows people who don't have worth of status to gain status. It's a real, a real sort of blending, dangerous blender of a lot of novel stimulus that no one really understands how to deal with. One thing that we maybe previously would have had would have been commentators that we trusted coming through mainstream media. And I know that you looked at what makes a story go viral and why pundits suck nowadays. I think this is a little bit more prevalent in the US than it is in the UK.

• 37:26Chris Williamson?

  I'm not saying that the BBC or ITV are completely impartial or Sky News or anything else like that. I do get the sense that they're a little bit more about news than about opinion. So why aren't pundits stepping in and being the appropriate gatekeepers between reality and cultural consciousness that they should be?

• 37:48Scott Galloway?

  Because there's no money in it. And I just moved to London and my initial observation, granted, I'm going to everything British is charming and novel for me right now.

• 37:56Chris Williamson?

  I'm right. That's an accent in you.

• 37:59Scott Galloway?

  What I find is like, I believe in a nationalized healthcare system that also has a private layer. I think in a democratic or capitalist society, we have to acknowledge that rich people are going to have better lives. And I think that's the basis of capitalism, that we're going to have billionaires and people wanting to be one of those people is a huge motivator. And so I think a nationalized system that has a certain baseline level, a pretty good level of healthcare, and then a private label that emerges above it is actually a pretty decent system. And people will get upset about the inequity, but let's have a longer conversation about the inequities of capitalism. It's the least, like I believe what Churchill said, it's the least bad, the worst system of its kind, except for all the others. I think the same is true of media. The BBC wouldn't survive, I don't think, if it was for profit. I think if you're going to have straight down the middle, just the

• 38:44Scott Galloway?

  facts, man, it's not as entertaining. It's harder to keep people engaged. It's a good brand positioning, but the reason why CNN and Fox went to either end of the poll is that it's just more entertaining. In the seventies in the US, we used to have, the news used to be a public service of networks that were making so much money running commercials against the Brady Bunch, or the A-Team, or Love Boat. They said, 30 minutes a night, we're going to tell you what's going on. And it's going to be nine minutes of commercials, 18 minutes of news, and three minutes of opinion. And there was this great skit based on that opinion on Saturday Night Live, where basically Dan Aykroyd would call Jane Curtin an ignorant slut. That was the opinion section, and they'd go at it. And then slowly but

• 39:27Scott Galloway?

  surely Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch realized that they should flip it, have three minutes of actual news, and 18 minutes of opinion, and reinforce people's tribal beliefs, and get angry, and go after the other side. And it's really entertaining. And we have this situation room. Like a headline or a Chyron that says things slightly better today globally doesn't sell. So we've kind of catastrophized the world. And when there are increasing gas prices, 71 to 73 days, there's 21 New York Times headlines. When of 80 of the last 85 days gasoline prices have declined, there's one headline. And so we've started, you know, CNN and Fox go to the left, go way to the left and way to

• 40:10Scott Galloway?

  the right. So I think having government, I think the only way you have what I'd call nonpartial or an attempt to have some sort of nonpartial news driven, I think it's got to have government support because it's not entertaining and it doesn't get the eyeballs. So I'm a big fan of the BBC. I'm a big fan of government-supported news and media. I think also social media needs more identity verification because I think bad actors weaponize misinformation. And I think we also need section 230 carve-outs such that if you spread misinformation around vaccines or elections, just as we've done around trafficking, you're have the same liability that this show has or the traditional media has. But pundits

• 40:52Scott Galloway?

  don't step into the fray because the really, the ones that are really trusted can make $10 million a year being partisan. And they're capitalists too. So could they go to PBS and be more neutral? Yeah. Could they go to the BBC and be more neutral? I'm doing a show on BBC. I just signed up. I'm doing a show.

• 41:13Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations.

• 41:14Scott Galloway?

  I like it. Thank you. I'm really excited about it. And I did it because everything the BBC does just kind of reeks of quality and production values. I also like the fact that they will fact-check everything to death, everything to death. And they will do their best to, you know, to call balls and strikes. I'm not making as much money there as when I worked at CNN. There's just not as much money in it. And so I like it. I feel good about it, but I'm in a position to do it. And when other people get offered big money to do something for Fox or CNN,

• 41:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Scott Galloway?

  you can't blame them.

• 41:47Chris Williamson?

  Well, you get a tragedy of the commons effect a little bit here, right? That by you taking the high road, that leaves a spot at CNN open for somebody else. So by you curtailing your ability to make money, now it's that you don't perhaps need to make so much money anymore. But I went to Broadcasting House about four weeks ago. I was back in the UK for a while. And I got to go to Broadcasting House. I don't know whether you've been there yet, but the, even the atmosphere inside of that place is a proper newsroom out the back. And it's behind where they filmed the six o'clock news on an evening time. You can see everyone scurrying around, writing bits and pieces. Apparently, the gentleman that I was there with that was interviewing me told me that during Hugh Edwards' announcement of the Queen's passing, like the main one that's

• 42:30Chris Williamson?

  going to be used for the next century for when the Queen passed, two of the workers that were in the newsroom behind were taking photos on their phone or some Instagram story. So Hugh Edwards is doing this really serious thing and in the background, there's two people taking a video of it who apparently were reprimanded very quickly and given a very big slap on the wrist. I was thinking there about this

• 42:58Chris Williamson?

  way that competition for eyeballs has evaporated some of the other more higher quality elements that came about in news programming. And there's this thought experiment that I learned about years ago to do with rats living on an island. So there's 100 rats living on the island. The island has a carrying capacity of 1,000 rats. These 100 rats are spending their time, they're doing art and poetry, obviously very smart rats, art and poetry and playing sport and making love and finding food and stuff. But they don't need to compete that much for food or for finding love because there's tons of spec carrying capacity. Now over time, as the population begins to grow and grow and grow, you find that the rats who focus more on survival and reproduction and less on the superfluous things that add colour but doesn't actually add a reproductive benefit or a competitive benefit if it was

• 43:43Chris Williamson?

  in a commercial market, they end up being more successful.

• 43:48Chris Williamson?

  The survivors? Yeah, which selects over time more and more and more. And then after you reach full carrying capacity, once you hit that 1,000 mark, any rat that decides that he or she wants to try and do art or culture or poetry or whatever it is, they're immediately competed out of the gene pool or defeated in the market of ideas or the market of attention and eyes because they're unable to compete with the people that are chasing the only thing that really, really matters in terms of survival and reproduction. And I kind of see something similar here, that it does become a race to the bottom of the brainstem. If you, if you decide to do

• 44:25Chris Williamson?

  Less partisan talking points. If you decide to talk about more positive news stories, if you decide to be more balanced in your approach to things, if that loses the amount of attention that you get, where's that attention going to go? Well, it's going to go to somewhere else that does decide to put that sort of rhetoric across. So you have to play this game, or else you become one of the rats that's competed out of the gene pool.

• 44:47Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, there's a lot there. I'm not familiar with that, that study, but the notion of I'll equate survival techniques with grit. And there's a ton of studies showing that intelligence does dictate success, but tops out at about 110 IQ. So, smart people are more likely to be wealthy and successful than dumb people, but really smart people are no more likely than smart people. The delta is perseverance and grit. So, survival mentality. The reason I'm wealthy is because I didn't have a lot. I'm very talented, but if I had, I say this a lot, if, if I had what my kids have now, I wouldn't have what I have now.

• 45:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 45:29Scott Galloway?

  If I were my sons, and this is my struggle, the only two things I knew I would have as an adult male would be a Range Rover and a cocaine habit.

• 45:38Scott Galloway?

  I'm just not that, I would, I wanted money and I didn't have any. And I was smart enough to look around and American go, the difference between having better healthcare, living in a nicer place, having a broader selection set of mates, is money.

• 45:52Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 45:53Scott Galloway?

  And so, and, and for me, it became very apparent very early because my mom got very sick and I just saw US healthcare is really a caste system when it comes to, when it comes to money. And I, I decided very early, and people don't talk about this, or they don't, they don't like to admit it. I was, I had a monocular focus on it. That's it. I was like, oh, I don't want to meet a great woman, or I want to change the world, or I want to help climate change. No, no, no, I'm going to be fucking rich. That was, that was my decision as a younger man. And I want to be clear, it's not a, it's not something entirely in your control. I had a lot of winds in my back, but it was a sole focus of mine. And I also coach young men. Take economic responsibility for your household. And sometimes that means getting out of the way and being more supportive of your spouse or partner who's better at this whole money thing than you.

• 46:38Scott Galloway?

  That's also being a man. But a good place to start as a young man is you need to take economic responsibility for your household. That means figuring out a way that at some point you might be able to help your parents, figure out a way that you're economically viable, figure out a way that you can have the money such you'd have a very stressful life if you have, decide to have a family. So I like the grit component. I think the problem is the opposite. I don't think the island runs out of bananas and food and only the survivalists. I think the problem is actually the opposite, and that is we live in an era of superabundance. And that is our technology is so extraordinary at taking the same amount of inputs and producing so much more that our instincts haven't caught up to institutional production of sugar,

• 47:22Scott Galloway?

  fat, entertainment, porn. We're just, we don't know how to modulate these things. Because when we saw red meat, when we saw sugary salty snacks just a few generations ago, it was like, shit, eat it all because you don't know where your next meal's coming from. And so the, the fact that we get all of the superabundance now results in externalities. And anytime you take one commodity and turn it into something much more valuable, whether it's oil into petroleum, whether it's attention into money, there's externalities. There's been enormous externalities from the refining of fossil fuels. And I believe now there are enormous externalities around turning attention into dollars specifically through social media.

• 48:07Scott Galloway?

  And with fossil fuels, we watch it happen slowly. And what do we know about it? We know there's externalities. We know the longer it takes to address, the more expensive it is to unwind. But with social media and technology and search, we've seen these externalities like go up exponentially in just two decades. So I would argue it's, it's the superabundance that's the problem. Because if you look at, if you look at, there's some truth to a middle-class person right now in America, the UK, lives a better life than the wealthiest person a century ago. But there's so much abundance and so much opportunity to communicate abundance that nobody says, well, I should be happy. Look at how our grandfather lived and he was richer than us on a relative basis.

• 48:51Scott Galloway?

  All they think about is Instagram's shoving this picture, this person, all these people in my face all day long. And all I know about them is they're hotter and richer than me. That's the benchmark now.

• 49:02Chris Williamson?

  Dude, status and our living conditions are relative, not absolute. There was a study done where they offered people the choice between a 10,000 pound increase in their annual salary or a promotion to a newer, more hierarchical job title.

• 49:25Chris Williamson?

  More people chose the job title than 10,000 pounds a year, simply because we look to be, we want relative status. That makes us feel good. And I think that you're right as well. It's all well and good saying, look at the material abundance that we have now. But it's very quickly gone from scarcity to overabundance, hypernormal stimuli, too much food, too much information. Think about this, there was a period, I don't know, maybe the autumn of 2011 or 2012 or something like that, when we had the optimal balance between how much information we wanted and how much information we could access. For almost all of human history, a tiny, tiny little bit more information was maybe meant the difference between life and death. This winter, because you knew how to stitch a different sort of cloak together that you and your family could sleep under,

• 50:10Chris Williamson?

  or you found a new bush or a way to hoe the garden, whatever it might be. And then in, at some point between 2005 and 2013, that switched. And there was way more information than we needed.

• 50:24Scott Galloway?

  I think the pivotal moment was when social went on mobile. And that was all day long, you had an opportunity to get a quick Dopa hit. And you get the Dopa hit pulling your phone out even before you see it, to see what kind of affirmation, what kind of love, what kind of, how do I, how do I?

• 50:43Scott Galloway?

  Pair up, how do I measure up versus competitors? What's happening to my Doja Coin that day? Has anyone swiped right on me? Can I go, do I have an alert from YouPorn on some weird fetish thing that increasingly gets weirder and weirder? And it's in my, it's in my pocket all day long. And what you see is in 2013, when social on mobile, you saw skyrocketing levels of depression and self-harm. And this isn't self-reporting, this is actual hospital admissions. So the overabundance of information, constant stimuli. And then what you have is, it's especially appealing and especially prevalent among

• 51:23Scott Galloway?

  people whose brains have enough, have developed enough to appreciate it and need it and want social structure. You know, shaming and adulation and reaffirmation are important part of the species. It's important that we value certain affirmation, it creates good behavior and good role models. But when you don't have the capacity to absorb the negative stuff or modulate it, which is exactly where teenagers are, it results in in America, there's between 1 and 4,000 parents every night who take their kid to the emergency room because they're scared to go to sleep for fear of what might happen and what they might find in the morning with their incredibly depressed 15-year-old girl. So they just go, they just take the kid to the emergency room.

• 52:08Scott Galloway?

  And the emergency rooms around America don't know what to do because they're not used to it.

• 52:14Chris Williamson?

  How do you fix this problem?

• 52:15Scott Galloway?

  They don't know how to, they basically say, we can put them, we can put them on suicide watch, we can submit them to the hospital, but we don't know what to do. There's no like immediate therapy or drug we can give them.

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  Even SSRIs aren't going to step in and stop you from, I mean, what do you do? Take the phone away?

• 52:30Scott Galloway?

  Takes time.

• 52:31Chris Williamson?

  Take the phone away, isolate them from all of the people, the only form of... One question that I had in my head, a lot of the time people ask about, what would you do if you were in your twenties and pieces of advice? Very rarely hear people get asked about what you would do if you were in your 30s. So what advice would you give to people that are in their 30s or entering their 30s about how to operate in life?

• 52:52Scott Galloway?

  I think it's really situational. I don't think there's a user's manual. I think there's some best practices and I don't think it's that much different than in your twenties. The first is very primal. I think every person in their twenties and thirties should lift heavy weights and run long distances in their brain and in the gym. Push yourself really hard. When you're in your twenties and thirties, you don't even realize. How old are you?

• 53:13Chris Williamson?

  Thirty-four.

• 53:14Scott Galloway?

  Okay, so you look like a beast. And in twenty years, you're just gonna look back on how strong you were and just marvel at it. And you're gonna wish as strong as you were that you even pushed yourself harder. I rode crew. It was such a valuable part of my life I did at the age of nineteen. And I remember in the midst of a race, it's a two thousand meter race, and I remember not being able to feel my legs, starting to blackout and having to concentrate on not blacking out from exhaustion, and the oxygen in the air going down my esophagus was on fire.

• 53:46Chris Williamson?

  Tastes like blood and metal in your throat, yeah.

• 53:48Scott Galloway?

  And that was at eight hundred meters. And you'd go two thousand. And that ability, just when you think, just when you think you can't take anymore, that means you're about a third of the way to your limits as a human, as a species. Learning that as a young man or woman is a blessing. Because what it means is you have the confidence that when, when things are hard, physically, emotionally, mentally, you realize, oh my God, I could take so much more and still be fine. And when I worked, my first job was at Morgan Stanley, an investment bank. And I was undereducated relative to my peer group. Not because I didn't go to a great school, I went to UCLA, but I spent the majority of my five years there making bongs out of household items and watching Planet of the

• 54:33Scott Galloway?

  Apes. So I wasn't as skilled as my peer group. So I decided every Tuesday morning I was gonna come into work, and I wasn't gonna leave till Wednesday night. And I'm like, I can do that. I'm physically really strong. I'm mentally really strong. And it sent a signal to the rest of the organization that I came to play. Develop that kind of grit and strength emotionally, physically and intellectually in your twenties and thirties. You're capable of it. You're just gonna look back on that era and be like, just marvel at how out of fucking control strong you are, both mentally and physically. Two, get to a city if you can. And that sounds very practical or rote, but you'd rather be good in a big city than great in a small city.

• 55:13Scott Galloway?

  Before you collect dogs and kids, you know, being in a city is like playing tennis with Roger Federer or Nadal. When you play with people much better than you, your game gets much better. You're playing against the best when you're in a city. Find, create as many opportunities to find a mate. Now, what do I mean by that? Get out as often as possible. Accept invitations. Force yourself to go out. Force yourself to meet strangers. Develop the skills. Start, whenever you're waiting in line at Starbucks, talk to the person in front of you. Talk to the person behind you. Develop the skills to begin opening and establishing relationships. And it's uncomfortable and it means getting used to rejection.

• 55:57Scott Galloway?

  And by the way, the only thing I can guarantee you in life is rejection. And the only thing I can guarantee a lot of, if you want to be successful, is a shit ton of rejection. Being an entrepreneur just means you're willing to take out a big spoon and eat shit all the time. Talking people into working for you, talking clients into, to, to, to engaging you, talking investors into investing and having 90 plus percent of them saying no. And the same is true with successful mating. The most important decision you'll make in your twenties and thirties isn't where you live, where you work, what industry you're going to. It's who you decide to partner with, specifically who you decide to ultimately have kids with. And I have close friends who are monstrously successful by every external metric,

• 56:41Scott Galloway?

  and they don't have great lives because they don't have real partners and their spouses. And I have other friends who struggle economically and it's hard. But everything's a little easier for them because they have a real partner. And the way you punch above your weight class and find a great mate,

• 56:58Scott Galloway?

  you know, emotionally, intellectually, from a value standpoint, sexually, is you give yourself as many opportunities as possible. And my story is I met my partner who I had kids with at the Raleigh Hotel, at the pool at the Raleigh Hotel in South Beach about 17 years ago. It was the middle of the day and I walked in and I think it's important to do this. I walked in and I saw someone I was really attracted to. And I said, "I'm going to talk to this person before I leave." And I promised myself. And I went up in the full light of midday sun when she was sitting with another guy and another girl and opened. And without the aid of alcohol, that is not easy. That is not easy. And fast forward, my oldest son's middle name is Raleigh.

• 57:44Scott Galloway?

  If you, nothing wonderful is going to happen to you unless you take an uncomfortable risk. So get good at taking them. Get good at sending blind emails to LinkedIn contacts to ask them for coffee, to see if they'll talk to you about that industry. Reach out to people, tell them you admire them. Try and become friends with them. You know, "You're, you're an interesting guy." I was just thinking to myself, "I'd love to know this guy. Does he live in London? He just seems very cool." Get comfortable taking those sorts of risks. Get comfortable with rejection. Nothing wonderful will happen to you unless you take an uncomfortable risk. The most important thing you can find in your life in your twenties and thirties is something that you're good at such you can start building a base around economic security.

• 58:28Scott Galloway?

  But the, the real key is to find a great partner. And that is going to be a function of liquidity. How many great partners, potential great partners you approach? And unfortunately,

• 58:40Scott Galloway?

  The far left, of which I'm a part, is counseled men that if you start talking to a woman at work and you express any sort of interest, it means you're toxic. No, it doesn't. If you don't know the difference between expressing interest and having coffee with someone and harassing them, you've got much bigger problems. A third of relationships begin at work. I'm not suggesting anyone should ever abuse their power. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't be very careful that you're ever leveraging power, making anyone uncomfortable. But for God's sakes, go up and talk to strangers. There's nothing wrong with that. And if you approach a strange woman and try and express, get a conversation going, and she's not interested, you're both gonna be

• 59:22Scott Galloway?

  fine. You're both gonna be fine. And what I see is a generation of men who don't take care of themselves physically and become so isolated that the idea of talking to a strange woman is so alien and uncomfortable to them, they'd just rather stay home and do something else. And I don't want to stereotype all introverts is leading to bad places. That's not true at all. But the majority of men you talk to, they want to be financially successful, and they want to have a great partner at some point. And that is a function of your willingness to put yourself in an uncomfortable situation. So, anyway, get mentally and physically strong, take economic responsibility for your household, get out of the house as much as possible, try and find

• 1:00:05Scott Galloway?

  things where you're building something in the agency of others. I don't care. Every day you should be around strangers. Every day. I don't care if it's work, I don't care if it's church, I don't care if it's nonprofit, a softball league, the gym, classes, whatever it is. You need to be around a massive number of strangers and finding reasons to have, bump off of them, and find economic and personal and platonic opportunities as often as possible. We are a social species. Get to a city, get around a lot of people, get out there every day, start making money, and become really strong. You should be able to walk into any room at your age and think, if shit got real, I can kill and eat everybody or outrun them. One or the other. Now I'm at the point where I can do neither.

• 1:00:49Scott Galloway?

  I'm not strong and my knees are going, but anyways, at your age, it should be one or both.

• 1:00:53Chris Williamson?

  You could pay someone to kill everybody or come.

• 1:00:56Scott Galloway?

  There you go.

• 1:00:58Chris Williamson?

  That would be your solution.

• 1:00:58Scott Galloway?

  There you go. Yeah.

• 1:00:59Chris Williamson?

  Scott Galloway, ladies and gentlemen. Uh, dude, I appreciate the fuck out of you. This is really, really interesting. I've been looking forward to speaking to you for a while. If people want to harass you online and find all of your stuff, where should they go?

• 1:01:10Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, to resist this futile, I'm everywhere.

• 1:01:14Scott Galloway?

  Prof. Galloway on Twitter, uh, profgalloway.com. And just, uh, and my new book, Adrift, American 100 Charts, available on, let me think, Amazon.

• 1:01:24Chris Williamson?

  Let's go. Scott, thank you.

• 1:01:26Scott Galloway?

  Thank you. Thanks for your good work and congrats on all your success.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:01:45Scott Galloway?

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stone, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:01:53Scott Galloway?

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.