Aug. 4, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
47:27
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| Well, I focus a lot on what I think is the group that has fallen furthest fastest in the United States, and that is young men. | ||
| If you look globally, the group that has ascended the fastest is women. | ||
| Twice as many women have been elected to parliamentary positions globally in the last 30 years. | ||
| The numbers doubled. | ||
| More women are seeking tertiary education globally than men now in the U.S. | ||
| More single women own homes than single men, about three to two college enrollment. | ||
| Women are killing it, and we should do nothing to get in the way of that. | ||
| Women in urban centers under the age of 30 are now making more money than men under the age of 30. | ||
| The group that's fallen furthest the fastest is young men. | ||
| four times as likely to kill themselves, three times as likely to be addicted, | ||
| 12 times as likely to be incarcerated, 70% of the homeless. | ||
| Joining me today is a marketing professor at NYU Stern School of Business, | ||
| an investor, a serial entrepreneur, the host of the Prof G Show, | ||
| and the best-selling author of the new book, The Algebra of Wealth, | ||
| A Simple Formula for Success. | ||
| Scott Galloway, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| Scott, I mentioned to you, we've only been online for about 20 seconds here before the camera started rolling, you are on my very short list of sane people. | ||
| Do you take that as a compliment or is that a bit of a problem these days? | ||
| No, I'll take it, but it'll be interesting to see where we're done, where we are after this, but yeah, I'll take it. | ||
| You've sort of made a splash kind of more mainstream in the past year as the world has gone kind of wacky. | ||
| Obviously you're at NYU. | ||
| We've had a lot of upside down stuff going on at the universities and strange things as it pertains to protesting and free speech and all of that stuff. | ||
| Are you enjoying this time in the limelight that you're getting? | ||
| Did you intend that or would you prefer to be writing books and kind of just doing the university stuff kind of under the radar? | ||
| Yeah, it's sort of a weird thing. | ||
| I said to my friend of mine last night, I had dinner with it, after working my ass off for 30 years, I'm an overnight success. | ||
| That's always how it works, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, look, Dave, I'd be lying if I said I didn't like the attention. | ||
| I have just the right amount of fame. | ||
| People come up to me on the street and are really lovely, really nice, kind, polite. | ||
| Even if they disagree with something, we have a civil conversation. | ||
| I think it's a shame that all of these LLMs crawling all of this information out there aren't crawling real life because I generally find, and I bet you find this, look at your comments online and then look at how people treat you in person. | ||
| And I'm called Professor Genocide online because of my views on Israel. | ||
| But, you know, people couldn't be nicer in real life. | ||
| So I have just the right amount of fame. | ||
| People are lovely, but I can also still be sort of anonymous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's interesting. | ||
| I always tell people as it pertains to the comments, it's like, if you get a million views on a video, that means you probably got say 20,000 comments. | ||
| Well, 900,000 plus people may have loved it, but the certain type of person that comments is a very specific psychological makeup usually. | ||
| Although I can tell you, our comments are pretty damn good. | ||
| So I think, I think you're going to be okay today. | ||
| Yeah, YouTube's actually pretty friendly. | ||
| And also the strange thing about it is I think a lot of the comments are bots or bad actors just trying to sow discord within our nation. | ||
| So unfortunately, I think the comments aren't even a reflection of the American populace. | ||
| It's very easy to weaponize these platforms. | ||
| If I was working for the CCP or the GRU, and I know this sounds paranoid, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong. | ||
| I think the cheapest way to divide America is from the inside and just to create fights all the time between us. | ||
| So it's hard to even tell what's real and what isn't. | ||
| It really is, and it's gotten way more dysregulating as somebody that's been in the online game for quite some time. | ||
| Is it fair to describe you as a classical liberal? | ||
| When we've played clips of yours, I always sense that that's probably how you would define yourself politically, but I don't want to speak for you. | ||
| You know, I call myself a raging moderate. | ||
| I'm center-left. | ||
| I think Israel has probably pulled me a little bit center-right, but I think I represent maybe even the majority of people out there, and that is on certain issues, I lean left, and on certain issues, I lean right. | ||
| But I try to be a critical thinker and go issue by issue. | ||
| It's difficult because the one thing everyone's agreed on is that you can hate moderates. | ||
| So the right calls me a libtard, and that's fine. | ||
| They just write me off. | ||
| The left is even worse, though. | ||
| The left acts as if I've betrayed them. | ||
| They'll say stuff like, we thought we could trust you. | ||
| They seem sort of emotionally hurt that I've betrayed them. | ||
| There really isn't room online for the middle. | ||
| And I worry that because we're all human and we don't want to be shamed, that was how you died. | ||
| You got shamed or expunged from the community or the tribe. | ||
| That we all start barking up the same tree and when you bark up the same tree you become stupid. | ||
| So I purposely go on Fox and conservative radio because I find generally speaking as you get to know people you find that you have more in common than you think and I go on a lot of left stuff. | ||
| But anyway, center left kind of going center right just because of Israel. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I completely hear you. | ||
| I have no doubt that many of my audience kind of feel the same way. | ||
| And that has, that sort of tracks my own political evolution. | ||
| I'm wondering though, do you, so are you still getting invites for those lefty things? | ||
| I mean, I saw you on Bill Maher. | ||
| I think he sort of counts in the, in the rough ballpark that we're talking about, but I have found it's just increasingly difficult to find people on the left that are willing to have those conversations where I agree. | ||
| People on the right, they'll disagree with you and then they'll want to have dinner with you. | ||
| Yeah, I get called on because I think I get engagement. | ||
| I think I have a good twist or turn of phrase, and I'm not afraid to say things that are counterculture. | ||
| So the bottom line is they'll have anyone on that can help them sell more restless leg syndrome treatments or opioid-induced constipation medication. | ||
| So these are businesses, right? | ||
| But I haven't found either side has tried to silence me or doesn't want me on. | ||
| People, generally speaking, just want smart, thoughtful, entertaining people on. | ||
| Let's back up for a second. | ||
| For people that don't know you or have only seen a clip or two of yours on the show, can you just kind of give a little bit of a background that kind of led you to being the voice that you are these days? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Child of a single immigrant mother that lived and died a secretary, I consider myself a product of big government. | ||
| The generosity and vision of California taxpayers and the Regency University of California gave me accessible and affordable education. | ||
| When I applied to UCLA, it was 76% admissions rate. | ||
| It's going to be 9% this year. | ||
| I started out in business, started a bunch of internet companies, got some wins, some fails, but one of the great things about America is you can recover after some fails. | ||
| I got a couple wins. | ||
| That's all I needed. | ||
| And at a young age, I was cursed with this wonderful opportunity or decision of what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. | ||
| I decided I wanted to teach. | ||
| I joined the faculty of NYU 22 years ago. | ||
| I've taught 5,500 students, started writing books. | ||
| Discovered podcasting like you and now I'm, you know, basically a storyteller for a living doing podcasts, speaking newsletters and writing. | ||
| How much of the university's NYU specifically shifted since in those 22 years? | ||
| There was definitely a moment about 10 years ago, I remember getting an email from my department chair saying that microaggressions would not be tolerated. | ||
| It went on to describe all the different things that counted as a microaggression. | ||
| And I remember thinking, wow, we have really lost the script here, that to think that this is supposed to be a place of free thought where we're, you know, the reason the university was placed outside of the city center of Athens is you were supposed to be free to say the earth might be round, not flat, and not worried about being burned to the stake, that our job is to be provocative. | ||
| And we started barking up the same tree, and there became this unfortunate oppressor, oppressed mentality, where it's, you had to be one or the other. | ||
| And I think unfortunately it created an orthodoxy that's created this kind of victimization culture amongst some of our best and brightest young minds where they feel like they're one or the other. | ||
| And I think as a result, they feel a loss of agency. | ||
| And unfortunately, I think a lot of these initially well-intentioned, thoughtful DEI movements and affirmative action, I'm a beneficiary of affirmative action. | ||
| I got Pell Grants because my mom didn't make any money. | ||
| I think that it started off with the right intentions and it just went too far and unfortunately became what I would describe as just blatantly bigoted. | ||
| The example I use is that, look, 60 years ago, there were only 12 black people at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. | ||
| It made sense to have race-based affirmative action, or at least I thought it made sense back then. | ||
| Now, 51% of Harvard's freshman class is non-white. | ||
| But the issue is 70% of those kids have parents from dual income homes that are upper income. | ||
| So all we've done is reshuffled the elites under the auspices of trying to grab the moral high ground. | ||
| And if you really wanted to help people and I generally believe that most Republicans and Democrats believe that there are some people with born are born with wind in their face through no fault of their own and deserve deserve a hand up. | ||
| Where we get into trouble is what are the metrics for determining who gets an unfair advantage, quote-unquote. | ||
| And I would argue that when you say, okay, people of color have taken a lot of shit, fine, they get advantage. | ||
| Well, what about women, right? | ||
| 73 cents in the row, okay, they deserve advantage. | ||
| Gay people, the Japanese, we intern them. | ||
| And unfortunately, where we ended up was with 76% of the people applying to college are quote-unquote deserving an advantage. | ||
| But when you're trying to advantage 76% of the population, you're not advantaging them, you're disadvantaging and discriminating against the 24%. | ||
| And that's where we are. | ||
| So I think it's a moment to be thoughtful about what we mean by affirmative action and just have something that foots to the reality. | ||
| And the reality is, and this is a sign of progress, in America today, and it has always been this way, but today, you'd rather be born gay or non-white than poor. | ||
| So my viewpoint is let's focus all this wonderful intentionality around helping people that need it on the poor and have it have nothing to do with physically measurable attributes. | ||
| I think that era has passed. | ||
| So in essence, and I think you've described it this way, you would say it's affirmative action based on income rather than race. | ||
| What would you say to somebody? | ||
| And I more, I think, fall into this camp, which is that all we can do is just get out of the way. | ||
| That's all the system can do at this point. | ||
| It's so corrupt. | ||
| These institutions are so out of whack. | ||
| They've now discriminated against Asians, say, at Harvard for so long. | ||
| But all we can do is just get the government and the institutions out of the way, and then you got a chance, and maybe it's going to work, and maybe it isn't. | ||
| I think that's cynical, and I think I'm proof that it can work. | ||
| I got Pell Grants. | ||
| I wouldn't have been able to go to UCLA. | ||
| Except that was probably 40 years ago or something. | ||
| Right, but I don't see why we couldn't return to that. | ||
| I don't think just throwing up your arms and giving up and saying, look, if you're born in a To a drug-addicted single mother, sorry boss, you're just shit out of luck. | ||
| Try and figure out a way. | ||
| And we'll always publicize the rare examples of kids who manage to overcome this. | ||
| But I think most people, including Republicans, would say, if a kid comes from a low-income household, we're going to try and find a way to maybe get him or her a hand up. | ||
| That's why I'm here with you today, Dave. | ||
| And this is a flex, but it's a flex. | ||
| Last year I paid $14 million in taxes, so it's worked out for all of us. | ||
| And to think that we can't make those sort of forward-leaning investments, Look, America isn't about identifying... For the record, I don't think it's that we can't do it. | ||
| My personal position would be that you would more so leave it up to charity and people individually deciding what to do. | ||
| That's kind of at a national level. | ||
| Get the government out of it. | ||
| Yeah, that basically at a national level. | ||
| Maybe you could do it more at a state level, but that the national machinery is just so broken or corroded that that really is the issue. | ||
| It's not that I don't want to help people and I do things privately. | ||
| Well, I think, look, I think Pell Grants on the whole have been good. | ||
| I think you could argue the student loans has been mixed. | ||
| It's gotten to, there's some quick fixes here. | ||
| Put my university on the hook for 30% of bad student loan debt and they'll stop giving kids $200,000 to become history majors slash bartenders. | ||
| There's some fixes here. | ||
| And generally speaking, if you just leave it to private industry and donations, then basically it's rich people who decide who get advantage. | ||
| Not the government. | ||
| I mean, do you think the government can do stuff on a systemic broad level that is pretty striking and can help? | ||
| So I haven't given up yet on the notion the federal government can step in and help underprivileged kids. | ||
| Yeah, you mentioned that that Israel had a bit to do with either your awakening or maybe what is perceived as your shift, something like that. | ||
| Did you see that stuff bubbling up within at NYU or within the left more broadly for a while? | ||
| Because I was 10 years ago, I was a big lefty. | ||
| I was on the Young Turks Network. | ||
| And one of the strange things for me as a liberal was that there was an obsessive hatred of Israel for all of these people, and it was the one place that had anything close to, like, the progressive ideas that they were always purporting to believe in. | ||
| So I haven't been that surprised in the last year, actually, but I know a lot of people have. | ||
| I was shocked. | ||
| If someone had asked me on October 6, what's the state of anti-Semitism in the U.S., I would have said, I don't think it exists. | ||
| And I'm an atheist, but I was raised Jewish. | ||
| I consider myself a Jew, especially now. | ||
| I feel much more Jewish. | ||
| But I was absolutely, you know that adage that two-thirds of an iceberg's mass is below the surface. | ||
| I came to realize 99% of anti-Semitism in the US was underneath the surface and waiting to bubble up in an explosion. | ||
| And I was absolutely flummoxed by what I described as this zombie apocalypse of useful idiots on campus. | ||
| And I have been disheartened, outraged, upset, and even more so than the students, some 19-year-old fucking idiot from Cornell testing the limits of his free speech, fine, okay? | ||
| Suspend them. | ||
| If they get in the way of a student accessing Powell Library, then do what we do to 91% of students at UCLA, expel them. | ||
| I mean, they make it sound like it's some crime against humanity. | ||
| We expel 91% of the freshmen. | ||
| Do the admissions process. | ||
| He this person is going to be fine who I can't forgive and I think we should take a heavier hand with and I've been advising the Regency University of California is these is faculty members who believe that they have the rights they believe that free speech has something to do with getting in the way of our mission to educate kids. | ||
| And showing empathy in any way whatsoever for a genocidal murder cult that would result in our gay students and faculty being thrown off roofs would result in my immediate extermination and their decision to either convert to Islam or be executed. | ||
| I generally think that if we made the mistake of bringing on faculty that lack that critical thinking, they should exercise their free speech 100% somewhere, and we should exercise our rights that employees are at free will and fire them. | ||
| I think we are being heavy-handed with the students. | ||
| In some instances, not all. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| But the folks I have absolutely no empathy for are faculty that have engaged in this nonsense. | ||
| And did you see that? | ||
| So if you were surprised sort of on the anti-Semitism part, did you see that part? | ||
| I mean, NYU is really one of the hotbeds for this. | ||
| NYU, which is in New York City, which is probably, I don't know, 18, 20% Jewish? | ||
| I thought the president of NYU, I think Linda Mills got it right. | ||
| She said, look, protest fine, trespassing no, and sent people in and cleared out the camps. | ||
| By the way, 40% of those tents were the same tents at Columbia. | ||
| There was definitely something orchestrated here. | ||
| I think she handled it well. | ||
| And for the most part, when I have been on campus, 99% of the students are going about their business. | ||
| I mean, the media, it makes for a great TikTok to show some of the incendiary, really disappointing things here. | ||
| But for example, Columbia, they elected as president of the student body a young Israeli girl and the vast majority of students are just going to class trying to get their stuff done So I think some of it has been blown out of proportion 24 arrests nationwide 40% of them they think aren't even students. | ||
| So you're talking about a pretty small faction What I'm disappointed with is a university leadership Has had a such a tough time just outright condemning these actions and taking swifter action against students and faculty Do you sense that, you know, we're obviously in the summer break now, that things will hopefully have calmed down in the fall, or really that just depends what's going on on the ground, you know, 9000 miles away from here? | ||
| That's my sense. | ||
| I mean, think about this. | ||
| This is how committed they are to the issue. | ||
| Once they return home to get their summer jobs as lifeguards, the whole issue takes a backseat. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| Actually, I think that if that survey of youth on issues that are really important to them, it was like the economy, bodily autonomy. | ||
| Strangely, and I think encouraging, number three was the deficit. | ||
| So I feel like these kids are much more economically literate or financially literate than my generation at that age. | ||
| And Israel in the Middle East was like 16th. | ||
| So the honest answer is I don't know. | ||
| But if I had to bet, I would say it's not going to come back with the same heat or intensity. | ||
| So that's actually a perfect segue to the next thing I want to talk to you about, which is sort of just young people in general right now, because we keep hearing, you know, that they're depressed and they're on medication and they're addicted to porn and all of this stuff. | ||
| And I've heard you talk about this just a bit, like, do you sense that this is Getting better somehow, or some of them are waking up right now? | ||
| I mean, I think there are some encouraging signs from Gen Z, but it's kind of a little hard to tell. | ||
| Well, I focus a lot on what I think is the group that has fallen furthest fastest in the United States, and that is young men. | ||
| If you look globally, the group that has ascended the fastest is women. | ||
| Twice as many women have been elected to parliamentary positions globally in the last 30 years. | ||
| The number's doubled. | ||
| More women are seeking tertiary education. | ||
| globally than men now. In the U.S., more single women own homes than single men, | ||
| about three to two college enrollment. Women are killing it, and we should do nothing to get in | ||
| the way of that. Women in urban centers under the age of 30 are now making more money than men under | ||
| the age of 30. | ||
| The group that's fallen furthest the fastest is young men. | ||
| Four times as likely to kill themselves, three times as likely to be addicted, 12 times as likely to be incarcerated, 70% of the homeless. | ||
| And the difficult thing, Dave, is we don't want to have, we can't have a productive conversation because of the advantage that I definitely received and I would argue you received a little bit by virtue of being white heterosexual males. | ||
| I don't know your sexual orientation, I'm going to guess. | ||
| I'm actually gay, been married 10 years and have two kids. | ||
| But I don't want any advantages for that. | ||
| So I hear you. | ||
| I believe I received advantage. | ||
| 98% of venture capital raised was by guys like me, exactly my profile. | ||
| And I think some of that reflects that women were not given and people of color were not given the same opportunities to raise money in venture capital. | ||
| I think it's changing fast. | ||
| I think it's a good thing. | ||
| What unfortunately I think what that has resulted in is that no one has no one few people have empathy For young men because they're paying for the price of my advantage And if any other group were killing themselves at four times the rate of the control group We would move in with social programs And we wouldn't say shit like they just need to be more in touch with their feelings or lift themselves up by their boots or whatever it might be we would be moving in with programs and more empathy and And I think young men are really struggling, Dave, and I think the data is overwhelming that we are raising a generation | ||
| of lonely, broke, and isolated men in the most talented, deepest resource companies in the world are all trying to convince these young men that they can have a reasonable facsimile of life on a screen with an algorithm. | ||
| You don't need friends. | ||
| You have Discord and Reddit. | ||
| You don't need to figure out a way to get a job, which is really hard, or take a risk by reaching out to potential employers or developing skills. | ||
| You can trade stocks and crypto on Coinbase and Robinhood. | ||
| You don't need to go through the The bullshit and the rejection of trying to find a partner and going out and looking good and putting on a nice suit and working out and showering for God's sakes and enduring the rejection. | ||
| You have porn. | ||
| And I think we're literally raising a group of like almost like a new species of males that don't engage and don't socialize and are becoming less Mammalia. | ||
| And I think they become more prone to conspiracy theory. | ||
| They become more likely to be misogynist, they become more homophobic, they become more likely to demonize special interest groups, and some, I think, they become shitty citizens. | ||
| And into that void have slipped some really unproductive voices that either want to tell them to be mean and coarse and take charge of their lives and treat women like property, or on the left, they lecture, be more like a woman. | ||
| That's not the answer either. | ||
| I think the data is overwhelming that we're producing the most dangerous person in the world. | ||
| And unfortunately, we don't seem to have the same empathy, which lacks a productive conversation. | ||
| Do you think some of that is just the natural extension of 20 plus years of the internet and social media? | ||
| And you mentioned Reddit and Discord and whatever else is out there, that it was just going to lend itself, that we could all just kind of corner ourselves off into these Weird micro-communities because it's kind of the easiest thing as opposed to showering and cleaning your room and some of the other Jordan Peterson-esque things that you mentioned there? | ||
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unidentified
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100%. | |
| I mean it's a few things. | ||
| For men it's a variety of things. | ||
| It's biological. | ||
| Men are maturing later. | ||
| Their prefrontal cortex is literally 18 months behind A woman, if an 18-year-old girl is applying to college and an 18-year-old boy, the girl is really competing against a 16-and-a-half-year-old boy. | ||
| Our school system is highly biased against men. | ||
| Boys are twice as likely to be suspended for the same behavior as a girl, a black boy five times as likely. | ||
| I imagine my boy and just how active he is and rambunctious he is having to sit still for 80 minutes and learn French. | ||
| It's just not Think about the behaviors we endorse in K-12 education. | ||
| Sit still. | ||
| Be organized. | ||
| Color-code things. | ||
| Be a pleaser. | ||
| They're basically describing a girl. | ||
| And we've had so much affirmative action, or what I would call Empathy, purposeful and warranted empathy for women. | ||
| Walk down the hall at NYU, there's Golden Seeds, Venture Capital for Women, Black Women in Consulting, Women's Support. | ||
| There is literally nothing that says blank for men. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| And so as a result, you have a group of people who just aren't tracking, just aren't pacing. | ||
| And If we're going to have an honest conversation around mating, we have to have an honest conversation. | ||
| First off, we have to acknowledge that genders, 95% will likely identify with one sexual orientation or gender. | ||
| And that doesn't mean you don't have empathy for people who are non-binary. | ||
| Let's stop this. | ||
| It's not a zero-sum game. | ||
| You can have empathy for young men. | ||
| That does not make you anti-women, right? | ||
| Civil rights didn't hurt. | ||
| White people, gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage. | ||
| This can be accretive, it can be additive, but there's just generally speaking a lack of, a total lack of empathy for these young men. | ||
| And we don't, like I said, we just don't move in with programs, the social media, biology has been a part of it, education system that's biased against them, social media, which sequesters us from one another. | ||
| I think a coarsening of our discourse, when I was young, And I went on a date. | ||
| I could date someone for three months and I'd have no idea what their politics are. | ||
| Now it's like, oh, I can't date him. | ||
| He's a Republican. | ||
| Fifty two percent of Democrats are worried their kid's going to marry a Republican. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Supposedly a third fewer people are speaking to their neighbors. | ||
| Versus 20 years ago a lack of religious institute. | ||
| I'm an atheist But I think a lack of religious institutions or the decline in religion I think has really hurt the United States because there's fewer and fewer places to realize That we're all in this together and kind of serve in the agency of something greater and just a final point. | ||
| I really think we'd benefit from From what Israel does, Israel has some of the lowest rates of young adult depression despite all the threats it faces because, in my opinion, of mandatory national service. | ||
| I think we would hugely benefit from all of our young people serving in the agency of our country, meeting people from different income groups, sexual orientations, economic backgrounds, and recognize We're all Americans first, and the reason we passed so much great legislation in the 50s and 60s in America is because most of our leaders had served in the same uniform. | ||
| I would love to see mandatory national service. | ||
| I want to back up for a second, because you mentioned atheism twice. | ||
| I used to be an atheist. | ||
| I'm not an atheist anymore. | ||
| But you sort of are echoing something that I heard Richard Dawkins say about six months ago, and he's really the number one, or let's say most prominent atheist in the world, that you see the utility, I suppose, for religion because of community. | ||
| Is that an odd realization to come around to as an atheist? | ||
| Yeah, so one of the advantages of your father being married and divorced four times is you get a lot of different exposure to different religions. | ||
| In the same year, I went to Unitarian Church, went to Hebrew school, and I played on the softball league for the Mormon Church, Latter-day Saints. | ||
| And what I generally found is that while I never got there in terms of faith around a super being, I got there around people coming together to help each other out and believing they're part of something bigger than themselves. | ||
| And it wasn't just God. | ||
| They were a part of being kind to each other. | ||
| I was very impacted by the Mormon church. | ||
| Every Monday night, I used to spend at the Jarvis's for family night. | ||
| Every Monday night, they have family dinner. | ||
| And that imprinted something on me. | ||
| They wanted to be successful. | ||
| They wanted to make money. | ||
| They wanted to go to college. | ||
| All these things imprinted on me. | ||
| And my first dance was actually at a dance at the Mormon church held. | ||
| So any institution that brings together people and, generally speaking, just tries to be kind and supportive of one another, I buy into. | ||
| My atheism, flipping back, has been a huge And I'm curious to hear a little bit about your journey. | ||
| It's been a huge unlock for me because a recognition of the finite nature of life, believing that at some point I'm going to look into my son's eyes and know our relationship is coming to an end, gives me a lot of courage, Dave. | ||
| I used to be so scared of what other people would think of me and getting the affirmation of others and worried about failing publicly and being shamed. | ||
| And now knowing that everyone I worried about is going to be dead and so am I in 50 years, I find it sort of an unlock. | ||
| I think it helps me love out loud a little bit. | ||
| I think it gives me more confidence to take risks. | ||
| And also for me, it's made me a little bit more emotive and articulating of my emotions and how strongly I feel about some people. | ||
| So for me, it's been an enormous unlock. | ||
| Yeah, I'd actually love to explore that further with you, maybe on a separate show or on your podcast or somewhere else, because I have an interesting journey as it pertains to all of that as well. | ||
| I was on tour with Jordan Peterson as he was describing sort of why he felt atheism doesn't really work except in some very extreme circumstances. | ||
| And I was kind of going through my own thing and we were having kids, which is biologically difficult when you have two males. | ||
| And then I would say there's a series of other things that kind of altered that, but maybe we can pick that up at another time. | ||
| Um, I want to talk a bit about wealth actually, because, um, if someone, if you would have said to me, uh, I dunno, 30 years ago, Dave, you're going to have done as well as you did. | ||
| I honestly don't think that I would have believed you because I'm not particularly good at math. | ||
| Even carrying the one can get confusing to me sometimes when I'm putting a tip on a check. | ||
| Uh, and yet I've done fairly well and started some businesses and one of them went public. | ||
| So things have kind of worked out. | ||
| And one of the things that I see now sort of related to the young men, uh, young males portion of this. | ||
| Is that people don't see a path towards wealth. | ||
| They don't see a path towards actually owning things and getting ahead in things. | ||
| I always say the two things that sort of economically make sense to me is I know things are going well when the price of food is down and when interest rates are low so you can buy a house. | ||
| Like to me it's not much more complex than that at like the most simple level. | ||
| But what are your sort of main take or main Takeaways that you would want people to know about how to start thinking about wealth clearly. | ||
| Well, the first is to just acknowledge that America becomes more like itself every day and my book isn't about the way what America should be. | ||
| It's about what America is and I think America is a loving generous place. | ||
| If you have money, I think it's a rapacious violent place. | ||
| If you don't. | ||
| And so I just think economic security, having a plan for economic security is an absolute must for people, especially for men who are disproportionately evaluated on their economic strength. | ||
| And that's not to say that women shouldn't take economic responsibility, but 25% of men state economic viability is a key criteria in a mate. | ||
| It's 75% for women. | ||
| I think that's low. | ||
| I think they're sandballing it. | ||
| I think it's 90%. | ||
| So I think you need a plan. | ||
| Now, what is that plan? | ||
| The first is find your focus, find your talent, not your passion. | ||
| Anyone who tells you to follow your passion is already rich. | ||
| And the guy telling you to follow your passion made his billions in iron ore smelting. | ||
| Find something you're really, really good at that you could be in the top 10 or the top 1%. | ||
| What creates passion is mastery. | ||
| No one grows up thinking they want to be a tax lawyer. | ||
| The top tax lawyers understand client skills, taxes, math, the law, and can bring it all together. | ||
| They fly private and have a larger selection set of mates than they deserve, which makes them passionate about tax law. | ||
| It's mastery. | ||
| It's ninja-like command of something that gets you economic accoutrements, camaraderie, loyalty, prestige. | ||
| And as you get older, Dave, and I think you're going to find this, you get really passionate about taking care of your parents. | ||
| You get passionate about knowing that you cannot have the economic stress of an America that doesn't like poor people and you can focus on your relationships and offer opportunity. | ||
| When you meet somebody that needs help or an organization that's doing great work, you can give them money and it doesn't hurt you and it helps them. | ||
| So, economic, find your talent through focus. | ||
| And then, time. | ||
| Recognize that for 99% of our time on this planet, we didn't live past 35, so the human brain is not calibrated for time and how fast we'll go. | ||
| Wow, this life went really slow, said no one ever. | ||
| You're gonna be my age before you know it. | ||
| And then that goes to the next thing, and that is compound interest. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| I'm 59. | ||
| You've only got 11 years on me. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I am going to be there before I know it, yeah. | ||
| But if I had – the private school debate, right? | ||
| I just spoke to the board of a Tony private school here in New York, and I said, if you were really honest, you'd tell people the following. | ||
| Send their kid to the closest school. | ||
| A lot of studies show that's the best you can do, and take the additional time savings and reinvest it. | ||
| In homework, sleep, play. | ||
| Take that $62,000 that it costs to go to Grace Church or First Presbyterian downtown and pay yourself that tuition every year and put it in SPY. | ||
| Now, assume you screwed up and that public school doesn't get them into an elite school, doesn't get them the economic opportunities you'd hoped for them. | ||
| You can ease that pain with $5.4 million when they're 35. | ||
| Right, you'll be okay. | ||
| You'll be just fine. | ||
| So people don't understand that math. | ||
| And then finally, where I screwed up, Dave, was diversification. | ||
| And that is, I had a company go public, but I borrowed money to put more money into it, and I ended up broke at the age of 42 because I wasn't smart enough to take money off the table and put it in different areas. | ||
| Because the reality is, as much as we'd like to think that as a successful person we can shape the world, The market trumps individual dynamics and sometimes you're just going to get unlucky and sometimes you're going to get lucky, but diversify. | ||
| I wish I had done that earlier. | ||
| I would have been fine if I'd done that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| We were just having a conversation with our financial people about what we want to do with the kids as it relates to college. | ||
| And I was like, I'm not putting a college fund together, but I will set aside a certain amount of money each year that we're going to invest properly so that hopefully they come to, they come to me at 17, 18 and they say, dad, this is sort of what I want to do. | ||
| And we can figure out a way to help set up a business or buy a house or something like that. | ||
| So do you think it's just that, that in some ways we're realizing that a lot of these institutions, And ways of thinking of the world have just sort of gotten to the end of where they're at and that we just need to think about things in a new way. | ||
| Like, I mean, even just as it pertains to education and everything else, the amount of homeschooling we're seeing now, charter schools, school choice, that we should just maybe get away from such controlled environments in a lot of these disciplines. | ||
| I think it's a situation like if you look at Cal State that's offering classes in cybersecurity or, you know, specialty construction or nursing that with one or two years can get you a good main street economy job at 80 or 100 grand. | ||
| I think we need more of that, not less of it. | ||
| If we're talking about elite institutions that sit on an endowment that's the GDP of Costa Rica but don't want to expand their freshman class size faster than population, they should lose their tax-free status. | ||
| They're no longer public servants. | ||
| They're Chanel bags. | ||
| They're hedge funds offering classes. | ||
| And you could argue, well, they do great research. | ||
| Can you explain that a little bit more? | ||
| Because I don't think people really understand these endowments and just why they sit on this amount of money or why they have this amount of money in the first place. | ||
| People just kind of hear it and it's just like, oh, they've got all this money and it doesn't really do anything beyond that. | ||
| You graduate from Harvard and the first communication you get is a series of communications that basically say your worth is a function of your ability to demonstrate to your colleagues you graduated with how successful you are by virtue of how much money you give back. | ||
| And that it's the right thing to do, and we're going to come together every one, two, or five years and celebrate the people who are successful, who are real men, who are real women, based on how much money they give back to us. | ||
| And they've aggregated $54 billion. | ||
| And at the same time, they have not expanded their freshman class size. | ||
| They let in 1,500 people freshman class. | ||
| That's what a good Starbucks does. | ||
| They could admit 15,000 people a year, they could pay for those 15,000 kids, and yet they decide to hoard. | ||
| And let's be honest, Harvard? | ||
| A Harvard degree? | ||
| If I had a pill, if I had a drug that made you less likely to be obese, less likely to kill yourself, more likely to get married, more likely to be president someday, Less likely to suffer from severe depression. | ||
| Would I hoard that drug? | ||
| That's what's called elite education. | ||
| I mean, let's be honest, it's still powerful. | ||
| For the majority of people who go to Yale and shitpost it, they still wouldn't trade it in. | ||
| They still wouldn't say, no, I'd rather not have that Yale degree and those contacts and that learning. | ||
| But why on earth would we hoard that? | ||
| They could. | ||
| Can you imagine what they could do for the state of Mississippi with one or two billion dollars of that endowment if they opened a Harvard annex in Mississippi? | ||
| They could afford it. | ||
| They have everything. | ||
| But instead they decided, no, we want every day, me and my colleagues wake up and we look in the mirror and we ask ourselves one question. | ||
| How do I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability? | ||
| And we found the ultimate strategy, and it's a luxury brand strategy, where we purposely, artificially constrain supply such that it creates prestige and aspirational value, such that when my dean stands up and says, we rejected 87% of our applicants, what does the faculty do? | ||
| They stand up and applaud because it makes them feel important. | ||
| That is not the mission. | ||
| We are not here to identify a super class Of rich kids and freakishly remarkable to make us feel better about the rich kids we bring in. | ||
| I think we should be America where I was in college and that is I was a mediocre slash good student but I didn't test well and UCLA rejected me. | ||
| I was one of the 24% that didn't get in but I appealed and they let me in. | ||
| I got a 2.27 GPA. | ||
| And what did the greatest public institution in the nation do, Berkeley? | ||
| It let me into graduate school. | ||
| And because in my view, public education is about giving the bottom 90 a chance to be in the top 10, not taking the top one and trying to turn them into billionaires. | ||
| I think higher ed has literally lost the script. | ||
| I do think there are examples of universities doing the right thing. | ||
| I think the University of California is committed to expanding its freshman class size. | ||
| University of Arizona, under the leadership of Michael Crawford, wants to educate hundreds of thousands of students. | ||
| Purdue has not raised tuition in 15 years. | ||
| Some of them got the message, but there's other ones, especially our elite institutions, that should have their tax-free status rejected. | ||
| Do you think something went particularly sideways at Harvard? | ||
| Because it seems like it's the epicenter of all of this. | ||
| I used to go to a lot of like fancy rich people dinners and everyone was always talking about what's happening at Harvard and I never really understood why it mattered. | ||
| What you just explained really does kind of get to the center of it. | ||
| Did something particularly bizarre happen there? | ||
| You know what it is. | ||
| It's just it's the easy poster child for all elite education. | ||
| And the reality is we speak too much. | ||
| And I'm part of this problem about the Ivy League because the reality is Florida State is fulfilling their mission. | ||
| Florida State will graduate more students this year than the entire Ivy League. | ||
| And so our great public universities, a lot of them are still trying to to maintain their status as public servants. | ||
| But Harvard is just sort of an easy kind of an easy target and sort of embodies some of these some of these issues. | ||
| You also talk a bit about diet and exercise, which kind of has become like the hot thing online. | ||
| We've been doing a little bit more of it on this show instead of so much political stuff, but I do see a connection there between people taking responsibility for their lives, understanding food sources and all that, and then, and all of the public policy part. | ||
| Was that, was that something that always was interesting to you? | ||
| I think it's hugely important. | ||
| I mean, the right kind of weaponized mass and all of a sudden made wearing a mask a political statement. | ||
| I don't think that's true. | ||
| But the left, we weaponized obesity, and that is, we didn't want to have an honest conversation on the left. | ||
| 88% of mortality of people who died had at least one precondition, and 82% had two, and almost all of them were related to the pandemic that kills millions of people every year, and that's obesity. | ||
| And because there's money in it, because the food industrial complex wants to addict you to, you know, shitty sugary food and then hand you over to the diabetes industrial complex where they can make $10,000 or $15,000 a year off if you have hip replacements, knee replacements, statins, high blood pressure medication. | ||
| There's so much money in keeping America fat. | ||
| 70% of America is either obese or overweight. | ||
| 70% of America isn't anything. | ||
| And then we have these apparel companies and beauty companies shaming us, telling us we're bad people, that we're fat shaming if we just have an honest conversation of obesity and try and portray it as finding your truth. | ||
| No, you're not. | ||
| You're finding diabetes. | ||
| And I'm not saying don't have empathy. | ||
| I'm not saying don't figure out a way to get kids good nutritious school lunches. | ||
| But we need to go back to the Kennedy years and celebrate fitness and strength. | ||
| Did they have the Presidential Fitness Awards when you were a kid? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Okay, so it was this thing. | ||
| Yeah, I think it was long gone. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| It was probably in the late 60s, right? | ||
| Well, I did it. | ||
| And every year I was going to get that goddamn badge. | ||
| And the one year I didn't do it. | ||
| It was serious. | ||
| Like, you had to do seven pull-ups. | ||
| I remember that was the hardest one. | ||
| And then a certain amount of sit-ups in a minute. | ||
| Run a mile in a certain amount of time. | ||
| And then they decided that it was fat shaming. | ||
| And they got rid of it. | ||
| Physical strength, especially for men. | ||
| I think it's really important. | ||
| I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I believe any man, I coach a lot of young men under the age of 30, should be able to walk into any room and know if shit got real, they could kill and eat everybody. | ||
| Or when you get to my age, outrun them. | ||
| Physical strength You're going to look back. | ||
| I mean, you're obviously in shape. | ||
| You obviously work out. | ||
| You're going to look back at the physical form, men and women, when you were young and think, oh, my God, why didn't I lean into that and just become so fucking strong? | ||
| You're mentally healthier. | ||
| You're nicer. | ||
| You're kinder. | ||
| Who breaks up fights in bars? | ||
| Big, strong people. | ||
| It makes you feel better about yourself. | ||
| You're more likely to attract mates. | ||
| You're going to be more successful. | ||
| People look at you and they go, this is someone I can count on. | ||
| They can commit to something. | ||
| They're disciplined. | ||
| They have grit. | ||
| They can work through pain. | ||
| That's called being really fit. | ||
| I think it's hugely important. | ||
| I think we've got to stop this nonsense of believing that in any way it's shaming people | ||
| and to not acknowledge. | ||
| Biology is basically set around obesity. | ||
| Oh, wait, but that's bigoted. | ||
| And biology said, hold my beer. | ||
| I'm going to give you diabetes and cost you and society a ton of money. | ||
| This is something that fitness should be celebrated and massively incorporated back into our school system. | ||
| How much of that do you connect to what we were talking about earlier | ||
| about sort of where young men are at with things as it pertains to being online | ||
| Because I can pay you a personal compliment here, which is that my executive producer, Phoenix, is a huge fan of yours. | ||
| And my whole crew here in the last year, through you, through a whole bunch of other people, we kind of all shifted our diet. | ||
| We're doing more carnivore kind of stuff and some other things working out, and we're all kind of doing it together. | ||
| So I can honestly tell you that at 48, I turned 48 two weeks ago, I'm at the best shape I've been in in 25 years at the moment and eating the best and everything else. | ||
| Um, but it's not a, but the point is it's not a coincidence. | ||
| It's partly because of the community that I literally built in this room. | ||
| And that's in contrast to what you were talking about before, where we have these, these micro communities, but they're not really about kind of fixing yourself. | ||
| It becomes about a whole bunch of other weird stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I look, I love, I've worked out four times a week since the age of 18. | ||
| My dad, when I was 10, got me started doing these Royal Navy workouts. | ||
| And by the way, how old are your kids, Dave? | ||
| They'll be two next week. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| So that's the other reason I had to stay in good shape, because truly, I want to be able to play basketball with them when they're 20. | ||
| And that was one of the main things. | ||
| Yeah, just word up, it gets much better. | ||
| Zero to three is awful. | ||
| I don't care what you're pretending to say it's like, it's awful. | ||
| Three to 13, it's a golden decade, and then they start hating you, but you got some time before that. | ||
| But one of the things I'm doing with my boys, 13 and 16, is we work out together. | ||
| They're like me. | ||
| They're skinny and they're weak at this point. | ||
| They're tall and skinny. | ||
| It's just such a gift. | ||
| But I struggle with anger and depression, and I have this method. | ||
| When I know I'm going dark, I have this kind of method for behavioral modification for trying to Arrest the doom loop down, and it's called SCAFA, and S is sweat. | ||
| I just find if you're down, lift weights, resist, run till you're really like cooked. | ||
| I find that kind of resets the computer. | ||
| C is clean. | ||
| I try not to eat out as much. | ||
| I'm constantly on the road, so I'm constantly eating out, but when I feel myself going dark, I try and eat really clean, not as much. | ||
| Preservatives or butter or salt. | ||
| A, abstinence. | ||
| And what I mean by that is I love alcohol and I love THC. | ||
| It's been a really nice part of my life, quite frankly. | ||
| But when I'm feeling down, I try and just give that stuff a break. | ||
| F is for family. | ||
| And I know you know this. | ||
| Hanging out with your two-year-olds. | ||
| They are just so difficult and so selfish. | ||
| You can't spend that much time thinking about your own shit. | ||
| And then A is for affection. I spend a lot of time with my dogs. My kids will flop their legs | ||
| on mine on the couch. I just try and be around other people in the sense of kind of touch, | ||
| if you will. But I think that sweating and worry, a decent forward-looking indicator of your success | ||
| is the ratio of time you spend sweating to watching other people sweating. Show me someone | ||
| who watches ESPN three hours a day and then watches football all day on Sunday. | ||
| I'll show you a future of failed relationships and anger. | ||
| Show me someone who works out every day or every other day. | ||
| I'm going to show you someone who's successful. | ||
| 484 of the Fortune 500 CEOs work out five times a week. | ||
| Now I'm really feeling good about life because I also live in Miami in July, and I'm telling you, whether you sweat, whether you want to sweat or not, whether it's intentional or not, you're basically dripping all day long. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I didn't know you were in Miami. | ||
| Where in Miami are you, Dick? | ||
| I can't give you the exact address on the show, but I'd be happy to make some steak for you one of these days. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| Let me ask you one other thing that sort of encapsulates all this. | ||
| We're living in this completely insane political time, which I think really is how you got on my radar from doing Mars Show and a couple other things in the last year or so. | ||
| You know, between Trump assassination attempt, Biden now stepping down and we just, it sounds like we're not even going to hear from the guy for a week. | ||
| How long do you think that can work for a society? | ||
| That's one of the things that I'm worried about, that we're just like caught in this script that feels just wildly out of control. | ||
| And no matter how many times good, decent people like you or whoever else is out there, try to give people sort of a roadmap to be okay amidst all of it, that it just feels like it's getting crazier all the time. | ||
| Well, that's a generous question. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| Yesterday morning when Biden dropped out, someone called me and said, how are you feeling? | ||
| I'm like, a mix of relief, a mix of anger. | ||
| I'm just like, I'm just kind of sick of all this. | ||
| I just feel, I don't know how you're in the, you're living in the uncertain. | ||
| I just feel exhausted by all of it. | ||
| And I got off of Twitter a year ago. | ||
| That's been really good for my mental health. | ||
| And I find, what I would say to people is, Separate the person from the politics. | ||
| I have a home in Delray Beach near you in Miami, and I would say the majority of my friends are conservative or Trumpers. | ||
| And what I decided several years ago is to separate the person from the politics. | ||
| I like them so much, but I don't want to talk politics with them. | ||
| And you know, we don't need to know politics. | ||
| And also, everyone doesn't need to know every one of my opinions on everything. | ||
| We have so much more that we share, whether it's family or sports. | ||
| But again, it comes back to national service for me. | ||
| We need to start seeing each other as Americans first, not red or blue. | ||
| And also, I'm hoping that we can figure out de-gerrymander, maybe get some money out of politics and have more moderates. | ||
| Just because I find now politics, because of this sort of TikTok fundraising incumbency, an actual downward loop, that the way you get reelected is to be on the far left or the far right and just get moments on TikTok that will raise you more money. | ||
| And they start hating each other, and they don't want to work with each other, and they're no longer legislators. | ||
| They're kind of like porn stars of a modern day. | ||
| I find that really unproductive, and I find that, generally speaking, the majority of America wants to get stuff done, doesn't hate their neighbors, acknowledges points on both sides, and are moderates. | ||
| And I feel as if we're just squeezing out the middle, that there's just no room for us anymore. | ||
| Long story short, we've got some work to do, huh? | ||
| Yeah, just a touch, Dave. | ||
| Just a touch. | ||
| But look at you, man. | ||
| You're evidence of what makes America great. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| You're super successful. | ||
| Gay man. | ||
| Sounds like you're in a healthy relationship. | ||
| Raising two two-year-olds. | ||
| Like we're doing something right. | ||
| Let's celebrate that. | ||
| That's how you end a show. | ||
| Scott, I thank you. | ||
| And I look forward, I'll meet you in Delray. | ||
| We can sweat, we can have some steak. | ||
| I'd like that. | ||
| And tequila, you do tequila? | ||
| I know not when you're on a downward spiral, but... Yeah, always. | ||
| That's always a yes. | ||
| All of that. | ||
| Done. | ||
| If you're looking for smarter conversations about academia, check out our academia playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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