THE ED MYLETT SHOW - Why Following Your Passion Might Be Holding You Back with Scott Galloway
Episode Date: October 29, 2024Ever wonder what true wealth is? In today’s episode, I sit down with Scott Galloway, a fierce thinker, NYU professor, and one of the most influential voices on business, technology, and modern soci...ety. Scott pulls no punches as he redefines what it means to be truly wealthy—and why it goes beyond the numbers most people think about. Together, we confront the gap between appearances and actual financial security, touching on the lifestyle traps that can lead high-earners to economic stress, while those who live strategically build lasting wealth. Scott and I also dig into the concept of following your passion. For all the young people out there, Scott makes a compelling case for honing your talents in practical fields, building toward mastery rather than just "following dreams." We’re breaking down what it really takes to succeed in a world that loves glamorizing the "overnight success" without showing the grit behind it. We also tackle the future of artificial intelligence and what it means for today's workforce. Scott warns us that AI itself isn’t the enemy, but ignoring its potential impact on every job market could be. For anyone worried about the future, his advice is simple but profound—learn the tools of the new economy so you're always ahead of the curve. Finally, we take a hard look at some tough societal issues, from the challenges facing young men today to the influence of social media on youth mental health. Scott’s unapologetic take on the need for positive male role models, community involvement, and emotional resilience is a wake-up call to us all. Key Takeaways: True Wealth: Why wealth is about security, not salary, and how to focus on what really matters. Practical Passion: The balance between passion and talent, and how to build a career that sustains both. AI Advantage: How to future-proof your career by mastering the essentials of AI. Building Strong Men: The importance of male mentorship and community in shaping resilient young men. Social Media’s Toll: The hidden costs of social media on youth mental health and what to do about it. This episode isn’t just an interview; it’s an education in life strategy. Tune in, take notes, and be ready to rethink how you approach wealth, success, and influence in every part of your life. Get ready to dive into some of the most essential, unfiltered life advice you will ever get! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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So hey guys, listen, we're all trying to get more productive and the question is, how do you find a way to get an edge?
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["The Admirals Show Theme Song"] Ed.
This is the end.
Hi everybody. Welcome back to the show. So the gentleman that's on the show today,
I wanted to have him on for a long time.
I've been a fan of his work. If you're old enough,
you ever liked the dos Equis guy,
like the most interesting man in the world.
I kind of consider my guest today, that guy.
Go on. It's true! Sharks have a week about me, Ed. I'm telling you, the reason is you can ask him about almost any topic, whether it be money or current issues, the economy, social stuff, emotions, you name it.
He's just so well spoken on so many different things. He's a contrarian thinker to some extent. He's also a very intense guy
and he speaks his mind. I don't agree with him on every single thing he says, but I find myself
nodding and cheering for a lot of the things that he talks about. Been very successful in business,
had some exits, had some stuff that hasn't worked out as well, but he's become a very, very wealthy
man, young in his life as well. Teaches at NYU, he's a professor of marketing there,
but this guy is the real deal and his brand's exploded the last few years.
So, successful podcast as well.
That's probably enough. Let's get into the conversation.
So, Professor G, Scott Galloway, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much. And let me just say, I'm really enjoying this podcast so far.
So far, it's just working for me.
And you're being, thanks for your generous comments. It's true though. I mean it and that's why,
you know, I do a lot of intros. They're not always that long or that
complimentary. So, got a book out right now called The Algebra of Wealth. He's
had a bunch of different books that have crushed but I'm gonna ask you about
wealth first because I think you have a really interesting statement about what
it is. What is wealth by definition for you?
Like the definition of wealth is what?
Having an absence of economic stress
so you can focus on your relationships.
Rich is the kind of the people see,
wealth is the things that people don't see.
I love this quote from,
it was called The Little Prince,
this great little movie when I was a kid and it said,
the essential is invisible to the eye, real wealth is invisible to the eye.
And it means that you have enough economic security that you can focus on the other things
that are really important in life.
And you can achieve wealth different ways.
And that is the definition of wealth more specifically or more mathematically for me is
passive income that's greater than your burn. So I have a close friend who's the head of M&A for a
large bulge bracket investment bank, makes between three and $10 million a year, all current income,
lives in New Jersey. So he's taxed at 52% a year between his ex-wife, his alimony, his home in the Hamptons, his master the universe
lifestyle, trying to keep up with the Joneses. I'm pretty sure he spends most or not all of it.
And I also know it's incredibly stressful for him because he wonders what happens if the music stops.
And M&A has been down the last couple of years, so he hasn't made as much money as he was
anticipating. And even though he still makes millions, he's built a lifestyle where he hasn't been able to aggregate the kind of wealth where if he were to retire,
his passive income would not be greater than his burn.
And I'll flip to my father, who's 94, who between his pension from the Royal Navy and
Social Security, and he owns a few washing machines in trailer parks, he makes $52,000
a year in passive income
and he spends 48.
My dad really enjoys not spending money.
He is wealthy.
He never needs to work again.
So having passive income that's greater than your burn,
wealth is what you don't see.
And the key, the means is making money,
but the ends is having an absence of economic stress,
which can really damage your relationship
with your spouse, with your kids.
But having that taken out of your life
so you can focus on your relationships,
I think that's the definition of wealth.
Perfect answer.
By the way, totally true.
99% of my friends are the former description.
They make seven figures and they are not wealthy
because their burn is so high.
It's like a never ending burn.
The amount of money that they would need to accumulate
and based on how long life expectancies are going now
to exceed their burn rate, it's really stressful
for so many people that a lot of you follow
on social media that a lot of you think
are very wealthy people.
Scott is 1000%, right?
By the way, today we're gonna skip around,
like social issues, we're gonna talk about the way today we're going to skip around like social issues.
We're going to talk about young men.
We're going to talk about emotions.
We're going to talk about money because he is so skilled at these things,
but that's the absolute definition of wealth and in my own case,
you know, Scott, I'll tell you I've been fortunate.
I've had a couple exits and I've made, you know, a significant amount of money
in my life.
And as I got into my 50s, I realized it's time to get serious about really
being wealthy meaning by your definition
What is all this stuff gonna cost me the next 30 or 40 years if the stops?
And that if the music stops is what most people don't consider. So he's a hundred percent right about that
I did something smart young and I want to ask you about this. I did not follow my passions young
And you talk about this really
eloquently. I chose a career that took advantage of
some natural proclivities that I had. Some giftedness of mine.
And when young people ask me all the time, should I follow my dream? Should I
follow my passion? I always say maybe, but I hedge on that because I
don't think you can be successful in life unless you become great at something.
And I think you become great at something, you have to have some natural
proclivity or talent at least trending in that direction.
You talk about that a lot. So what, someone's young listening to this or even they're in their middle
ages and they go, look, I want to switch careers. What advice would you give them?
So we have two types of speakers at NYU where I teach. The first is really accomplished, impressive people.
And the second is billionaires.
We've just decided that once your wealth has three commas,
you have insight into life.
And they always end their talks, or almost always,
with what I think is some of the worst advice
you can give a young person.
And it's the following.
Follow your passion.
And the guy telling you to follow your passion made his money or his billions in iron or smelting.
Anyone who tells you to follow their follow your passion is already rich. This is your job. Your job is to find something you're good at, which isn't easy, that you could potentially after you invest 10,000 hours and endure the bulls**t and demonstrate the grit and perseverance and overcome obstacles that you become great.
Aim to be in the top 10 or 1% of something and say, where could I do that?
And this is the key part.
In an industry that has a 90 plus percent employment rate, which by the way is 90 plus
percent of industries, and be careful not to mistake your hobbies for your passion.
I'm 6'2", I have a pretty good arm, a decent vision or plain of vision.
I'd really like to be quarterback of the Jets.
That's what I wanted when I was 16 or 17.
I was blessed to go to UCLA where they had real athletes and quickly learned I was never
going to be in the 0.1%, which you need to be in professional sports.
So if you want to be in acting, modeling, fashion,
nightlife, restaurants, you want to be a DJ,
I don't want to crush your dreams,
but unless you get bright flashing green lights
that you are in fact in the top 0.1%,
which you'll get that validation immediately.
If you're messy, people will tell you
that. If you don't, think to yourself, okay, where could I be in the top 10% where being in
the top 10% provides a great living? There are 180,000 actors in the SAG-AFTRA union, which,
by the way, is not an easy union to get into. It means you've done real work. It means you're
talented. And last year, 83% of those union members didn't qualify for health insurance because
they made less than $23,000.
So the romance industries attract too much human capital driving down the returns.
And also people think, okay, but I will never be, I'm giving up, I'll never be passionate about tax law.
Well, guess what?
If you have the discipline to get into good undergrad,
if you have the ability to get into a great law school,
if you understand the intersection of law and economics
and know how to handle clients and are good with numbers,
and you can bring that sort of skill,
the best tax lawyers fly private
and have a larger selection set of mates than they deserve.
And all of those things and the other accoutrements
of being great in a high paying industry,
camaraderie, relevance, prestige,
will make you passionate about whatever it is.
Passion comes from mastery.
It comes from economic security. It comes from prestige,
especially in a capitalist society. So your job is to find your talent, not your passion.
And trust me on this, as you get older, and Ed, you know this, what do we become passionate about?
We become passionate about taking care of our parents when they get older. We become passionate
about giving our kids some of the opportunities we didn't have.
We become passionate about taking our friends to Aspen
and not worrying about money.
That will, trust me on this, in a capitalist society,
whatever affords you that economic security,
you will become passionate about, find your talent.
I so agree.
Everybody, that's what I tell my kids.
I was golfing one time with Elway
and we were reminiscing on like all the cool courses
we had played in our life, you know?
Yeah.
Hey man, what's your favorite course?
And I thought, is he gonna say Augusta or Pebble Beach?
And he goes, come on man, you know this.
It's wherever you play the best.
That's your favorite.
Oh yeah, that's great.
It applies to what you just said.
If you get great at something,
you'll find yourself become pretty passionate about it.
And even if it's not,
if you're passionate about fly fishing,
get really wealthy so that you can go fly fish
whenever the heck you want.
This is absolutely cogent advice, everybody.
Here's the question I have for you.
You said, choose a career where there's a lane that's open
that you can solve problems
or that there's gonna be gainful employment. How do you know with AI?
I've not heard you asked about this. I'm sure you've answered it.
Just in my prep for this, I didn't see your answer about it.
What's your overall view if you're giving somewhat advice about their career?
Like I had a guy the other day go, this doesn't apply to me, man. I'm in the trades.
I'm like, well, they're 3D printing houses now,
so I don't know that it apply there as well.
So I want to leave my job, find a new career.
Okay, I got it. Check the box.
It should be something I'm pretty good at or I could get good at.
What about AI in your mind?
How's it going to affect the world the next decade?
So, look, nobody knows, but I have some thoughts on this.
And generally speaking, I don't see why AI wouldn't follow the same curve as every other technology. And that is when automation hit the auto industry, they were like,
that's it. No more jobs in the automobile industry. It's just going to be a bunch of robots
and occasionally a person upgrading the software. And in the short term, there's usually some job
destruction when there's a real technical breakthrough. As there was, we lost some jobs
on the shop floor in Detroit. But over the medium and long term, that type
of innovation usually creates more jobs because while there were fewer people on the factory
floor, we didn't anticipate heated seats or car stereos or GPS, which ended up creating
more jobs.
And now there's more jobs in the auto industry globally than there was pre-automation.
So I actually think AI will create more jobs
over the medium and the long-term.
And what I tell people is, I mean, there's certain industries.
If you're in customer service,
that's probably not a great place to double down right now.
If you're, I'm not sure I'd want to be a radiologist
or an epidemiologist right now,
but what I tell people is generally speaking,
nobody really knows,
but what I'm more confident saying is that
AI is not gonna take your job.
Somebody who understands AI is gonna take your job.
So let's lay off the woman who really understands AI,
said no employer ever.
Your job is to understand the intersection
between AI and your business.
Now AI could potentially come for our jobs, Ed.
There's now AI where they can come up.
I can say to AI,
I can upload every script from every Prop G and pivot
or a Raging Moderates episode and say,
in this voice, look at current events
with a focus on these three topics, create a script,
then I can go to another AI and have a reasonable fact
some way of my voice, read it You want to get really good at it and you want to figure out how
it's going to impact your industry. And what I've so far is it's pretty anodyne. It can't replace,
it's like all chip, no salsa is the way I would describe it. But if you get, what it does is it
starts me thinking and along the journey through AI, I realized, wow, it's not very good, but I can get 90% of the way there in Korean. It's impossible for me to speak Korean
using this AI tool I found. And that's going to make me, and I'm getting eight or 10 or
12,000 downloads in Korean now, where it reads my podcast in my voice in Korean. So this
is your job, trying to predict the future around which jobs will come and go around AI.
I think that's really hard.
What I can tell you is the ROI on spending 15,
20 minutes a day playing with AI.
You wanna understand AI,
you wanna prepare for an AI future,
go on ChatGPT, go on Claude and see the difference.
Go on Mid Journey, start playing with images
and get really good at it.
Cause I'm pretty sure it's gonna impact every industry.
I don't know which ones it's going to disrupt
or not disrupt.
If I had to guess it would be healthcare.
Because to me that's the place that's had the greatest level
of inflation relative to underlying innovation,
which is kind of what I call a disruptability index.
And I think AI will be the fist of stone coming for that
giant chin called the US healthcare.
But what I would say to anybody is the way you try to prep yourself or immunize yourself
against the AI future is to become, quite frankly, really good at it and understand,
all right, I am in customer service.
I run guest relations for the Beverly Hills Hotel.
I'm going to use AI. I'm
going to feed in all the customer data I know so I can anticipate people's needs, and then I'm going
to start educating the people around me. Then the person at corporate at Dorchester, which
owns this hotel, is going to go, that woman who understands AI, let's put her in a position around
strategy or what have you. But trying to figure out what industry you should go into based on technological innovation, that's a difficult one. If you'd gone into autonomous driving
10 years ago, which was the next big thing, those companies are struggling because tomorrow
doesn't seem to be today as quickly as they'd hoped. It's tough to chase technology. Can
you get a job at an AI company then take it but but the bottom line is
Learn about it understand it. That's how you that's the Kevlar for an AI future
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around other people that are growth oriented, you're much more likely to do that yourself.
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It's the Netflix for high achievers or people that want to be high achievers.
So go check it out.
My friend Brennan's made it very affordable, very easy to get involved. Go to growthday.com forward slash ed. That's growthday.com forward slash ed.
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slash Ed. See representative warranty for details. I was with my son yesterday
he's driving to the airport and they had one of those driverless Teslas next to
me and I said those Uber my son kind of agreed with me, he goes,
I don't know dad, I think that's further away than you might think. There's a few
of these right now but it's coming. It's just a matter of when it's coming. And
then I got on the airplane, I was prepping for this because I was excited
about it and I started to actually think about something I want to talk to you
about which was my son. My son's 22 years old. I have a daughter who's a
junior in college and I just left California.
I moved to Florida and people ask me often why did you make that move? And I said quite frankly taxes was a major.
Me too.
The other thing is I'd like to be around my children someday and I can't find a scenario under which I think they could possibly buy a home before they're 35 or 40 years old anymore, if ever there. A decent home there's
$800,000 to a million bucks. That means after taxes, my kids would have to have saved liquid cash of
two, $300,000. When the heck is that going to happen? And I started to think about the world that
my kids are in today. And I wonder what your thoughts about that.
I worry that the dream in many cases is much more difficult in the current tax climate.
I do look at two things.
I don't think you need to tax people more because the top 1% pay about 50% of all
the income tax in our country, bottom half pays almost nothing.
So this billionaire is going to pay their fair shares to me like a completely political line. Having said that, one of the reasons the bottom
half pay so little is they make so little. So growth has not kept up with
the whole with inflation in terms of home prices, consumer goods, etc. So
there's this challenge with wages, I feel like, in the United States.
And I worry about wages, particularly for young people.
What's your view on all of that I just threw at you for a 22 to 25 year old, where you
see the world going in such a direction where there is this disparity in wealth.
And to me, it's a wage gap, not a tax gap.
Well, first off, you're doing what I I call you're a great host because you're setting me up
for success because you know this is something I think a lot about.
So let's start with the problem.
The whole reason we do all of this, the whole shooting match is we want to have a household
and we want to raise good kids that are loving, secure, good citizens.
That's the whole shooting match.
We want to set our kids up for success.
We right now in America, despite our prosperity, unprecedented prosperity.
China's not threatening us.
No one's lining up for Chinese or Russian vaccines.
We have the strongest economic growth, the lowest inflation.
AI has created, there's been more wealth created in the seven-mile radius of
San Francisco International Airport in the last two years than the entire auto industry is worth
right now. America is killing it on most dimensions. Now, at the same time, we're raising a generation
of the most anxious, most depressed, most addicted, most obese young people in history, in the history of the US. For the first time in the US, a 30-year-old man or woman isn't as wealthy as his or her
parents.
That has never happened before.
That is a breakdown in the social compact.
The average 70-year-old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago.
The average person under the age of 40 is 24% less wealthy.
40 years ago, 60% of 30 to 34 year olds
had at least one child.
Now it's 27%.
People are opting out of America.
They've lost confidence.
And the strongest reflection of having confidence
or lack thereof is having or not having children.
Now why has this happened?
The incumbents and people my age will claim
that it's network effects or globalization.
They'll blame it on something else.
That's bull.
This has been a concerted decision by people my age
to transfer wealth and opportunity and prosperity
from young people to my generation.
What is the best means of for savings
and a kind of a path to economic security and saving money and forming a household?
It's buying your first home.
When I was when I got out of business school, the average salary was 100 grand.
The average house in San Francisco cost 280 grand, 200, 2.8 times.
Now the average salary out of the hospital business is 200 grand, which is amazing.
The average home in San Francisco costs 2.1 million.
So it's gone from 2.8 times to 10 times.
Education is up seven fold.
So how do you get ahead?
If you're smart and a good student,
you go to higher education.
How do you start to save money
and think about mating and propagating?
You buy a house.
Those two things have been sequestered
to the children of rich people
or the freakishly remarkable.
When I applied to UCLA just down the street from where I am
now, it had a 76% admissions rate, now it's 9%.
And the virus that infects our economy is the following.
We have adopted an LVMH rejectionist strategy.
And that is if I'm an incumbent and I already own a house,
I already own stocks, I already have a college degree,
the best strategy for me to increase my wealth
is to artificially constrain the supply
of all of those things.
So if I'm an alumni and I hear that UCLA's admissions rate
has dropped to 9%, I like that.
I applaud, isn't it great?
And you hear people brag,
I would never get into the university I went to now.
Well, guess what?
That means your daughter's not getting in.
Once you own a home,
you become very concerned with local traffic.
One of the worst things to happen to America
is new housing permits have basically been put
in the hands of existing homeowners
that like the fact
that we don't want new home permits, we need another one and a half to three million home
permits a year. So you have seen housing prices do the following. Pre-pandemic, average price of a
house was 290. Post-pandemic, it's 420. And with the unprecedented acceleration in interest rates,
the average mortgage has gone from $1,100 to $2,300, meaning
that whereas it used to be two-thirds of Americans could afford a house, now it's one-third.
And especially all of these factors really hit hard young men.
We all knew that guy in high school who was just never going to go to college.
The education system is incredibly biased against young men. Who do we
want at school? What behaviors do we incentivize? Sit still. Be organized. Be a pleaser. Raise your
hand. You just described a girl, but we used to have on-ramps into the middle class for that guy
who was never going to go to college, but we did away with wood shop. We did away with metal shop.
We did away with auto shop. A lot away with metal shop. We did away with auto shop.
And a lot of the industries that supported that middle and upper middle
class lifestyle have been outsourced.
And in addition, even worse, parents shame their kids
if they decide not to go to college.
You've been at those cocktail parties where hush, hush.
Oh, so and so dropped out of Rutgers. They came home.
Well, guess what?
Two thirds of American children
don't end up with a traditional college degree,
and that's okay.
There's actually been a surge in demand
amongst the trade jobs.
So what do we have?
We have a group of young people who can't afford a home,
can't afford the upward lubricant of mobility
in our society, unless they're the freakishly remarkable
or the child of a rich kid. You're 77 times more likely to get into an elite university
if you come from a top 1% income earning household because my generation has weaponized housing,
weaponized the stock market. COVID, $7 trillion into the economy, 85% of it wasn't needed. It was
saved.
Why?
Because you never miss an opportunity
to make my generation cheaper.
So what happened to that $5 trillion
that wasn't needed for food, wasn't needed for rent?
It went into the market, housing, stocks.
So what happened?
Stocks went on a tear.
Housing prices went insane,
which is awesome for you and me, Ed,
because we already own stocks and houses.
But what about the kid who's trying to get into the market? The reason why I am at the Beverly
Hills Hotel right now and I have economic security is in 2008, we bailed out the banks, but we didn't
bail out the economy. And Apple fell to eight bucks a share. Netflix fell to 12 bucks a share.
Amazon to nine bucks a share. I was coming into my prime income earning years.
So I put all of my money in those three stocks and they're up between 30 and 60 X.
Where does a young person find value when you bail out the baby boomer owner of a restaurant?
All you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 26-year-old recent graduate of a culinary
academy that wants her chance at disruption, wants to swoop in and buy a cheap home when
we have churned.
There are exogenous events.
We need turnover.
The key to capitalism is you let sh-t get real and you let assets fall.
But what we've decided is a million people dying from a virus would be tragic.
But what would be a disaster is if we let my generation get less wealthy. So here's
an idea. While I'm in the club doing rails of cocaine and partying with champagne, the
only way the young person participates is they get to lend me their credit card so I
can run up all this debt on their back so I can stay
rich.
We have literally lost the script.
My generation has been stealing from a younger generation and people want to claim they're
entitled.
Bulls**t, they're entitled to be enraged.
We are not making the same types of forward leaning investments.
Old people keep voting themselves more money.
40% of all government spending is now on people
over the age of 65.
It's gonna go over 50%.
And the next 20 years, meaning we can't make
forward leaning investments in education,
in R&D, in technology, in infrastructure,
that things that show an actual return on investment
and create jobs for young people.
This needs to stop.
We need a forward leaning.
There used to be 12 people supporting every senior.
Now there's three people. We don't have the money. We are robbing more and more prosperity
and opportunity from young people. And I'll return to where I started. What's the point
if we have depressed kids? What is the actual point of any of this if our kids aren't doing
as well as us? And you know what it feels like, you and I are blessed.
A disproportionate amount of opportunity
was sequestered to white heterosexual males
through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.
We took advantage of it.
And now young kids don't have nearly,
nearly the amount of opportunity we had.
I'll wrap up my word salad here just about tax policy.
You're absolutely right.
The thing that gets in the way of a progressive tax structure is when they need to start this
populist Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren bullsh-t of the billionaires, walk over people.
Here's the bottom line. The people who get most screwed in our tax code are what I
affectionately refer to as the workhorses. Mom's a baller at a law firm making a million and a
half bucks a year.
Dad is a chiropractor with four people working for him.
He makes 500 grand a year, 1.9 million in income.
If they're living in an urban center in a blue state
where you usually need to be to have that kind of job,
they're paying 52% in taxes.
They're paying way too much,
but something happens on the way to being a billionaire.
Once you make the jump to light speed and become an owner instead of an earner, which
happened to me about 10 years ago, I make all of my money buying and selling investments,
starting and selling companies.
My tax rate has plummeted to somewhere between 17 and 19% because of capital gains, because
of 1202.
So while the 1% pay too much in taxes,
the 0.1% pay too little.
The 25 wealthiest Americans in America
pay between an average tax rate of six to 8%.
Corporations are paying their lowest tax rates since 1939.
So the work horses lower their taxes.
The super rich and corporations,
I actually think we need to raise their taxes.
Well, another conversation the other day, I would argue they paid income on that money already,
but that's a whole other conversation.
Is it double taxation?
Yeah, I think I feel pretty strongly about that. I've been a fan all my life for lower taxes,
but there's now no evidence that that money is being returned into the economy
to benefit working people every day like I thought it would.
I thought if you tax the rich guys less, quite frankly,
they would dump that into increasing wages and they don't.
Companies don't do that.
And so I'm torn on it and that's why I asked you the question.
I'm really open to the answer.
And this thing you said about boys and girls, I just think gender neutral,
we build conformists in our education system.
I feel very strongly about that. We build robots that conform and follow instructions and
contrarians and weird people change the world.
I want more contrarian, weird people.
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There is something I want to ask you about that is gender specific that I've heard you talk about and I've only heard you talk about it.
And that is single parent homes as it affects young boys.
I'm not a big gender guy like boys
versus girls. I really just think most people are humans but there is a lot of
evidence about boys that are raised without a strong male figure in their
lives and I was with like I said I was with my son this weekend and of all the
things I am grateful for is he's had multiple strong male figures in his life.
He's had myself, he's had two great grandfathers, he's had multiple strong male figures in his life. He's had myself,
he's had two great grandfathers, he's had good coaches, good mentors in his life, and I feel like
in addition to being a white male, but what a great advantage it is. And there was another young
man with us who his dad's been in and out of his life most of the time and has not had a strong
male figure. His life has an amazing mother who's
worked two jobs and just has done everything she could for him. But in observing both of them in
the same screen over the same period of time, I did see a confidence and a way about handling
himself and a presence frankly to my son who I'm not saying because he's my son who's had strong male figures
and the absence of that in the other.
What do you what do you think is the solution to that?
And I'd like you to speak to that topic to so many single mothers listen to my show
and have these boys they love so much.
What can they do when this boy doesn't have that strong male figure?
So it's a generous question.
So first, let's talk.
Let's talk about the problem.
Young men are four times as likely to kill themselves.
If you go to a morgue and you have five people who have died by
suicide, four of them are men.
And if you had any other demographic group killing itself at four times the rate
of the control group,
three times as likely to be addicted, three times as likely to be homeless,
12 times as likely to be incarcerated, 40% less likely to go to college.
I mean, we'd be moving in with programs, but because of the advantages that our generation
received, there's a lack of empathy for them. And if you try to reverse engineer to,
and I do think we're finally having
a productive conversation,
the numbers are just so overwhelming
that people are finally starting to pay attention.
And then I track everything, I'm pretty into data,
I track everything I do.
And the number one email I've received
over the last three months
is some version of the following.
I get about 140 emails from strangers a day, and number one, I categorize all of them. The number one email is it too late to buy Nvidia.
It's hilarious. Everyone's obsessed with Nvidia. The number two email that I've gotten consistently
for the last three years is a mom, usually a single mom, asking for advice about her son.
And it goes something like this. I have three kids, two daughters, one son. My one daughter's
in PR in Chicago, the other's in graduate school at Penn, and my son, who's
25, is in the basement playing video games and vaping and seems just totally lost. There's
a variety of factors that have come together here. One is just biological. Men's prefrontal
cortex is 18 to 24 months behind the girls. They're literally more immature. Have
your son and his 10th grade friends come over and the 15 and 16 year old boys are boys and some of
the girls look like the junior senator from Pennsylvania in terms of how they equip themselves.
Two 17 year olds applying to college, a boy and a girl, the girl's competing against a 15 and a
half year old. They're just biologically maturing later. And there's something weird going on. I don't know if it's hormones or pesticides,
but girls are beginning to menstruate earlier and boys, their testicles are descending actually
later. It's actually headed in the wrong direction. So let's move to solutions. One,
I think we need to redshirt. And by the way, I'm parroting my Yoda on this, Richard Reeves from
the, who's the president of the American Institute on Boys and Men.
We need to redshirt boys.
We need to start them at six and girls at five.
They're just less mature.
Two, more vocational programming.
Bring back wood metal shop,
more freshmen seats at universities.
If you have an endowment greater than a billion dollars
and you're not growing your freshmen seats
faster than population growth,
you should lose your tax-free status
because you're not a public servant,
you're a f***ing Chanel bag. I mean, you've decided that you're basically
in the luxury business. I think we need a national service. I think men need to find
their fraternity. The thing you also mentioned, which is that if you were to reverse engineer
to where boys come off the tracks, it's exactly what you reference. It's when they lose a
male role model. We have the second most single parent homes.
Dan Quayle was right.
Kids are better with two parents.
Where he was wrong is it doesn't matter
if it's two women or two men, but if it's a boy,
he absolutely needs male role models.
What's interesting is that in single parent homes,
girls have similar outcomes,
similar outcomes of college attendance,
similar income, similar rates of depression, self-harm.
It doesn't appear to really damage girls
when they lose a dual parent household.
With boys, they come off the tracks.
What it ends up, the studies show,
is that while boys are physically stronger,
they're mentally and emotionally much weaker.
So what's the advice to moms
who are 93% of single parent households?
And let me be clear,
I was raised by a single immigrant mother
who lived and died as secretary, lied to my life.
But my mom immediately got men in my life.
The neighbor down the hall went out of her way
to introduce me to him, got the sense
he was an empathetic good guy. Used to take me horseback riding on weekends. I walked into a stock
brokerage when I was 13. I wasn't very popular. I wasn't very good at school. I was into stocks.
My mom's boyfriend gave me 200 bucks, said, if you don't go buy stocks by Monday, I want the 200
bucks back. I went down. When I was 13 13, used to take two dimes to the phone booth
at Emerson Junior High School,
call him my own Columbia pictures
and he would teach me about the markets.
Close encounters of the third kind is a hit.
That's why the stock was up 50 cents a day.
I'd go buy Dean Winter Reynolds on Westwood and Wilshire
and hang out with him for an hour.
Literally, Ed, 45 years later, he and I text each other.
Wow, well, male role models, if you're a single mom, you have to get men involved in your son's life. And also just for men, I've been thinking a lot about masculinity and what it means to be a man. You take care of yourself. You're fit, you're smart, you're kind, you take care of your immediate family. You take care, you start showing love and concern and empathy for your community and your neighbors. But the ultimate expression, in my view, of masculinity, is when you take an active role and you become
irrationally passionate about the well-being of a kid that isn't yours. Or put another way, if we want better men, we need to be better men. And unfortunately,
because of the Catholic Church and because of Michael Jackson, if a man who has love didn't care
to give wants to get involved in a young man's life, there's suspicion. Oh, no, there's something
wrong with him. No, there's not. There's a ton of men out there that for whatever reason, maybe they
have their own kids, maybe they don't, who have empathy and concern to give.
Here's the thing, you don't have to be a baller.
You don't have to be a senator.
You just have to be a man trying to live a virtuous life.
You know what the most important thing to being a male role model is?
Just being there, just spending time with the kid, giving him...
There are just certain things a boy is not going to talk to his mom about.
So it's a variety of social programs, taxation, vocational programming, red-shirting boys, national service, more freshman seats, and we as men, Ed, there are four-to-one applications
for big sisters in the U.S. as for big brothers. Men have to get involved in boys' lives. That's the bottom line.
And we're finally having a productive conversation because whenever, I think it really bottomed out
about two or three years ago, you started talking about the problems with boys, there was a gag
reflex of, oh, that means you don't like women. Empathy is not a zero-sum game. Civil rights did
not hurt white people. Heteron. Civil rights did not hurt white people.
Heteronormative marriage did not hurt gay marriage.
Recognizing the problems that young men are facing does not mean you're anti-women.
Who wants more economically and emotionally viable men?
Women.
How many times have we heard from people, I know all these great young women, high character,
attractive, professionally on the ball, and
they can't find a man.
No, they can find a man.
They just can't find a man they want to date.
We are creating millions of lonely, economically and emotionally unviable men.
It is something we really need to be focused on, and we need to stop this nonsense that
somehow that empathy is in any way anti-women or massages.
No, it's not. Women are making unbelievable progress.
We should do nothing to get in the way of that.
It's fantastic, but we need to acknowledge something is not right in Houston right now.
We need programs and we need attention and we need more men to get involved in the lives of boys.
So much you just said is true. My show, it's funny when it started, first three or four years is about 80% male
and now it's about 70% female and it's the number one message I get as well, is moms concerned about their sons
which is why I covered the topic today because you guys all know I'm not a big guy on this gender, that gender. I'm a big
human person. Having said that, a couple things he said I want to tell you. I was watching on the
flight back last night, I was watching a biography on Mr. Rogers and the same thing he said, just a
guy who loved kids as far as I know, right? And all the flack and criticism, just a man who lived a
virtuous life, who loved kids. We have to not stigmatize these men that would like to get
involved in the lives of young men and help them.
And the other thing everybody, you know, ask yourself if you have a son and he doesn't have a male figure, what male figure get in his life?
And the other thing to look at that he said that I just want to unpack the worst combo that I see is a little boy who does not have a male figure who is also not physically fit. 100%.
Look at their body.
If that young man doesn't have a man in his life, ladies, that you've got a son
and you're allowing him to get unfit physically,
that is a lethal combination for where that young boy is going in his life.
At least get him physically fit and active and working out and playing a sport
and on a good nutrition program. It's a deadly combination for your young boy if he's got both those things against him.
Okay, I want to ask about you. I don't have too much more time and I love talking with you.
So what do you do to recharge? I mean you're so reflexively, you know,
I don't want to feel like I'm stroking you on every question but like you're reflexively very smart on every question
and you bring an energy and an intensity to everything I'm stroking you on every question, but like you're reflexively very smart on every question and you bring an
energy and an intensity to everything I've ever seen you do.
Is there something you do for your own personal energy routine wise as a habit,
any ritual or routine that you do to recharge? It's,
it's more like me asking you a question the audience gets to listen to because
we're both involved in the same space and I'm always impressed with you just
always seem to be on when you need to be on.
You're being, okay, first off, you're being generous.
I f*** up a lot.
I make a lot of professional mistakes, be clear.
I've had several companies fail.
I've had failed relationships.
I've been married and divorced.
I've had a lot of self-inflicted wounds
that were unnecessary, but okay.
So how do I try to recharge?
Well, you said about fitness, just. And I can tell you're obviously
very physically fit. I've been working out four times a week
for 40 years. And I coach a lot of young men. And the first
thing I do is I say unlock your phone, I'm not going to be
judgmental. I'm like, I watch porn, that's okay. I'm not going
to be done on TikTok too much. I have the same addictions you do.
And I find eight hours in their phone. And I said, Okay, between
Coinbase, Robinhood,
Twitter, porn, we're gonna take eight hours, super easy to find, and we're gonna reallocate
that finite human capital. You want to lean into your advantage. When you're young, you have capital,
it's just time, it's not money. And the way you do it is if you reallocate that capital of time,
human capital, you'll eventually hopefully get financial capital. Like the first thing we're
gonna do is we're gonna start working out three to four times a week.
I think any man under the age of 30 should be able to walk into pretty much any room
and know that if shit got real, he could kill and eat everybody or outrun them.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
You're gonna look back on the incredible male form of that double twitch muscle,
that bone structure, and this unbelievably wonderful substance
called testosterone that gets poured over it.
And you're gonna think, why the f*** wasn't I a monster?
And if you were, and if you were in good shape,
it's gonna give you confidence,
it's gonna increase your selection set of mating,
you're gonna be much less to be depressed.
There's studies showing that exercise is just as effective
as SSRIs in many cases of mild
depression.
The reason why women and employers are attracted to fit people is because not necessarily because
big biceps make you more attractive, but it says something about you.
It says you have discipline.
It says you can commit to something.
It says you like yourself, which probably means you'd be a pretty good employee
and a pretty good father. And instead, we've decided because there's a lot of money in diabetes,
because there's a lot of money in obesity, let's say that obese people are finding their truth.
I want to be clear, we should have empathy for people who struggle with weight. We should try
and get rid of food deserts. We should have healthy eating funding
or funding that helps make sure that people
at least have the opportunity to eat healthfully.
But for God's sake, stop romanticizing obesity.
88% of the people who died in COVID
had at least one comorbidity,
and 82% of them had two.
And the vast majority of them were related to obesity.
So I love those old Kennedy videos where he said, we're going to build the strongest young
generation, and it's also amazing for women.
I think it's as important, is that true?
I think it's actually more important for men, but I think fitness among young women is amazing.
But the industrial fitness complex
took women to a weird place.
I used to do CrossFit, now I can, it's too intense for me,
but one of the things I loved about it
was we celebrated strength for women.
These firefighters, mostly gay,
would come in, these female firefighters,
and they had big f***ed thighs and huge powerful asses,
and we celebrated that strength.
We're like, just strength is awesome.
You don't need to be rail thin
and go get your boobs done to conform
to this equinox bull version
of what's aesthetically pleasing.
We're gonna celebrate just raw strength.
And I absolutely love that.
And I think that fitness in your youth is hugely important.
If you look at the Fortune 500 CEOs,
the one thing that 480 of them do is not that they went to an Ivy League school,
not even that they're white males,
it's that they work out almost every day.
This is where the first place we're going to reallocate your precious human capital.
The second is we're going to start making a little bit of money.
I don't care if it's an Uber driver,
stocking shelves at CVS,
the best way to make a lot of money is to start by making a little bit of money. I don't care if it's an Uber driver, stocking shelves at CVS, the best way to make a lot of money
is to start by making a little
and you get a taste for the flesh of money.
You start thinking about it and you're out in the public.
And then the third thing we're gonna do
is we're gonna surround ourselves
three or four times a week,
church, temple, nonprofit, riding clubs, sports league,
whatever it is,
you are going to put yourself
in the company of strangers such that you develop those skills and you increase the
likelihood you're going to find mentors, friends, and mates.
Fitness, making a little bit of money and putting yourself in the company of strangers
working in the agency of something bigger than yourself.
But for me, I agree with you.
It starts with fitness.
It is my antidepressant.
When I'm on the road and I don't get to work out
in two or three days, I can feel myself getting angry.
I can hear myself role playing, being hard on myself.
I feel less confident.
I think it is hugely important.
And I think even more so for men
because we are meant to be protectors.
And feeling strong, who breaks up a fight at a bar?
I'll tell you who, a big ridiculously buff guy
who's confident, who's like, I don't have a little dick,
I'm big, I'm strong, I don't need to get in fights.
I break up fights, I bring peace.
I bring a sense of calm and security.
You wanna be that guy. And I think a lot of calm and security. You want to be that guy.
And I think a lot of that starts with fitness.
You run hot.
You're like me.
You run pretty hot.
You're intense.
I am as well.
I've done a lot of work on this over the year.
Like my default emotion is politely called intensity and more truthfully called probably particularly
I was younger anger a little bit a lot of that and I know a lot of people like
you and I that have had exits or that are at the Beverly Hills Hotel or that
have had their success which is where Scott's I'm interviewing him from today, but what I mean by this is they've had
success but lack fulfillment and
Don't live I mean if the quality of your life is truly the quality of your emotions I think poverty makes it very difficult to live in positive emotions because you're it's there's a scarcity going on
There's a fear. There's a lack of being able to provide. We both would agree with that. But I don't see necessarily a dramatic correlation between my
friends with a lot of abundance and emotional well-being. I'm wondering if you see that as well
and if in your own life, beyond working out, beyond the things you've described, have you
struggled with your emotional regulation? Is there things you do to take an inventory of your emotions?
Do you just pay it? Do you pay attention to it?
Do you recommend people pay attention to it?
If we become too sensitive to those things in our cultures,
what are your thoughts about fulfillment and especially just, you know,
living in the emotions most would seek the desire to have?
So, and I've been open about this. I struggle with anger and depression. I have blessings the
size of Saturn and I have a mood the size of a small rock. I'm just, I had sort of this
revelatory moment about eight, nine years ago. I call my sister every Sunday or every other Sunday
and I was complaining and complaining and she just stopped me and she said, Scott,
And I was complaining and complaining and she just stopped me and she said, Scott, you have less right to be pissed off and angry than anyone I know.
She's like, look at your life.
Look at your life.
I was on the phone yesterday with a friend of mine and I was complaining
about the room I got at the Bellevue's hotel.
It's not as nice as when they usually give me, but then they upgraded me.
And that was like the worst thing happening in my day.
And he was talking about what ketamine therapy he should have delivered to his
house or should you go to some amazing resort and in Montecito?
I'm like, these are our biggest problems.
We're to get ketamine therapy.
And I didn't get the room I wanted to the Beverly Hills hotel.
And as humans, we're competitive and we're meant to focus on the threats.
And we're meant to focus on the things that aren't protective as a survival and
an innovation, a competition to make the species better.
The problem is it can become out of control. And if you're like me, you focus on the 1% that's not
right with your life. I can feel myself going dark. I mean, going to a depressed angry place.
And I have a bit of a, you know, I would say, if at some point you recognize your mood does not
fit to your blessings, some of that can
be motivational.
I try and turn my anger into being raw and authentic.
I try to take advantage of some of those embers in terms of burning brighter in terms of my
content, but it starts to turn on me.
When I get upset, I get angry at something, angry at myself.
I don't forgive myself.
I'm very hard on myself and it's like acid running through my veins and then it takes
a toll and I get dark and depressed for two or three days.
Don't want to talk to anybody, become just totally withdrawn.
And when I recognize that I'm going dark, I do a few things and I call it SCAFA.
The first is S, I sweat.
I'm not feeling good, I sweat. It's like a reset button on a computer for me, I sweat. I'm not feeling good, I sweat.
It's like a reset button on a computer for me, I sweat.
The C is clean.
I try and cut out trans fats.
I try to eat at homes, reduce the salt, the sugar,
just eat well.
The A is for abstinence.
And what I mean by abstinence is I love alcohol.
I love THC.
I just take those things out of my life for a little while. Whatever's going on in my brain, I need to give the pleasure receptors a break, and I
don't do alcohol or marijuana for a while.
The F is family.
I find that if I'm around my boys, they're so wonderful and at the same time so difficult,
it takes me out of my head
because I have to focus on their s***,
which is really helpful for an angry depressed person
who becomes mildly narcissistic focusing
on what they don't like about their life
and how they failed themselves and everybody else
and goes to a weird place.
My kids take me out of that.
And the final A is for affection.
Being around my dogs a lot, telling my kids,
I'll tell my boys I'm not feeling great.
And what they'll do is when we sit down on the couch, they'll throw their legs over mine.
That's, you know, they're not willing to like hug and kiss me anymore because, you know,
they're at that age. You're like, dad, no, I'm not going to hug and kiss you in case somebody sees us.
But they'll do stuff like they'll hang out with me. They'll give me a hug. They'll throw my legs
over mine. And that helps take me out.
But I struggle with it.
I don't, I still look at my life.
I still look at how angry I am and how cynical I am about the world.
And I'm like, and that gets me even more angry at myself.
And then just a gratitude practice talking about on Saturday, I went to some friends,
60th birthday that I've known,
I saw guys I've been friends with for 40 years,
I met at UCLA in 1982.
And all of us get together,
a dozen of us get together, it feels like every year
and seeing their kids, seeing our blessings,
seeing our prosperity, seeing how smart we were
to be born in America, best decision I ever made.
You just can't help if you have any sense of perspective,
feeling really good.
And I try to think about that a lot,
because it helps me.
But this is something I struggle with every day.
And the fear is, and I'll wrap up here,
the fear is you get to the end of your life.
I think about death a lot.
It's actually quite liberating for me.
I'm a raging atheist.
And you think, okay, a life of incredible prosperity, blessings, people that love me, people I love unconditionally,
but I never allowed myself to be happy, never was in the moment. That's the biggest risk I have,
is that I get to the end and think, Jesus Christ, look at all this. And I still really didn't
absorb how blessed I was
or I was never really there for it
because I was in the past
because I struggled from depression.
I was in the future because like you, I'm successful.
And successful people are in the future a lot.
They're thinking about what they need to do next
and they're not listening to their kids.
They're not engaging with their spouse.
I think about this a lot.
Do I have the answer?
No. Do I still struggle?
Yes. But I'm cognizant of it. And I think about this a lot. Do I have the answer? No. Do I still struggle?
Yes.
But I'm cognizant of it.
And I tried to develop a framework early
for identifying when I'm angry and depressed
and what practice physical, mental, emotional,
what people I need to have around me
to try and get out of it.
Because it is, it is Ed,
I know you're gonna agree with this.
Can you get over how fast life is going?
I mean, it's flying by. And so when I'm at the end,
I at least want to know that mostly
I squeeze the sh** out of this lemon called life.
It's going by too fast.
And half of that squeeze is just being really grateful
and enjoying your blessings.
When you were just talking, I went,
that's why I like this guy so much.
I'm so attracted to him. I, by the way, I'm a devout Christian and you're an atheist and we both have reached the
same conclusions about something. I worry my biggest, I think about death every day and my biggest
concern, I said this this weekend, I've said this many times from stage, is that I'm going to get out
of this life having not really enjoyed myself very much and I struggle with it as well. I'm still working on it. It's still,
I think what I like about you is your vulnerability, your transparency,
your authenticity.
I also just love to surround myself with self-aware people,
even if they're aware of their frailties and their weaknesses and their
challenges. And, um,
I just think that's magnetic and attractive from you. I really,
really enjoyed today. I got one more question for you.
I really enjoyed today, like really, really enjoyed.
Thank you, Ed.
This is kind of funny, but I want to know, do you still think Zuckerberg is Putin's bitch?
I think that under the auspices of free speech, under the auspices of shareholder value, 24% of kids
13 to 17 say they're addicted to Instagram, or social psychologists say their use of Instagram
qualifies as an addiction. Can you name anything that teens have a 24% addiction rate to?
I mean, the thing we're gonna regret the most,
we're gonna look back on the era of big tech and say,
did they make our discourse more coarse?
Did we weaponize elections?
Did they income inequality?
Yes, yes, yes.
But the thing we're really gonna regret, Ed,
is we're gonna think,
how did we let this happen to our kids?
And so I think Mark Zuckerberg and Shel Sandberg
have done more damage to American youth
while making more money than arguably anyone in history.
And during that time, during that addiction
over the last two or three years
when all those studies were coming up,
metastock is up 90%.
So unfortunately there's a lot of money in addiction.
The highest margin products in the world,
whether it's alcohol or tobacco products have a deeply addictive money in addiction. The highest margin products in the world, whether it's alcohol or tobacco products,
have a deeply addictive component to them.
The difference with social is we've never allowed
that type of addictive product to penetrate our youth
just as their brain is getting hardwired.
So what do you have with a 13 or a 14 year old boy or girl
who are just going through puberty
and their brain is literally getting set
for the rest of their life? We're giving them a massive dopa bag called a smartphone and we're teaching them
to be addicts. We are setting up a generation of millions of young people who will not be able
to function without a constant dopa hit. And they're not just going to find it from social
media. They're going to start finding it from other places. So what,
in addition to the addiction, I think what we've let happen with social is they will
cash anybody's check, including a troll farm in Albania that decides to sow polarization,
sow discourse, misinformation up until an election. And I think that these individuals
have been weaponized by bad actors, whether it's the CCP,
I think the TikTok should be banned unless it divests to U.S. interests. I think Metta should
get huge fines when it comes out that the GRU or the CCP are manipulating their platform to sow
division and chaos. So is he Putin's bitch? I don't know. He is a vehicle for addiction for teens, and he has purposely delayed and
obfuscated obvious evidence that our children, our children are becoming addicted. There is no reason
anyone under the age of 16 should have a smartphone or be on any social media. And they say,
well, Scott, you're a parent. It's up to you. No, I'm not. I can't, anyone who says that it's about parenting
doesn't have kids because there's something even worse.
My colleague, Adam Alter and Jonathan Hyde
have done fantastic work on this.
There's a cohort effect where if your kid is not on Snap
or Instagram, he or she is even more depressed
because everyone else is on it and they are isolated.
They are ostracized.
So here's the deal.
We have to get the Kids Online Safety Act or COPPA.
It's crazy we're letting this happen to our kids.
We put a casino, an IMAX, a video game,
a constant dopa bag in their pocket.
So Mark Zuckerberg has done more harm to children while making more
money than any person in history.
That's a compelling answer, brother.
Piling answer. Yeah, you and I use Instagram.
Oh, I'm an I'm addicted. Do as I say, not as I do it.
And we're promoting this show today on Instagram probably, but I am with you 100%
as it relates to our children. My gosh, that 16 year old part for sure.
I agree with that.
Wow.
What a great answer.
Uh, today was awesome.
Thank you, Ed.
And I enjoyed the conversation.
I'd love to have you on.
You got something else going on.
Come on, please.
And we'll do it in person.
We'll do it in LA when we're in the studio next time, but thank you for today.
So much Scott.
Thank you, Ed.
And thanks for your good work and congrats on all your success.
Yeah. Likewise, my friend. Hey guys, the book that he's got out now, The Algebra of Wealth.
Go grab it. He's got a bunch of great books.
The Algebra of... what's the other? The Algebra of... I love that book. The Algebra of...
Happiness.
Happiness. So good. So good you guys.
Alright everybody, God bless you. Share today's show. I know you will. Max out.