ExpressVPN: Right now you can get an extra four months of ExpressVPN for free. Just scan the QR code on the screen, or go to https://ExpressVPN.com/PIERS and get four extra months for free. Author and podcaster Professor Scott Galloway and Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary join Piers Morgan to discuss the male loneliness epidemic, artificial intelligence, Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire and more. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Oxford Natural: To watch their full stories, scan the QR code on your screen or visit https://oxfordnatural.com/piers/ to get 70% off your first order when you use code PIERS. Tax Network USA: Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit https://TNUSA.com/PIERS to speak with a strategist for FREE today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Toxic Masculinity and Violence00:07:41
I don't think there is such a thing as toxic masculinity.
There's cruelty, there's abuse of power, there's violence, but toxic and masculinity are oxymorons.
45% of men 18 to 24 in America have never approached a woman in person.
Men need relationships more than women.
The harsh reality is when men don't have romantic opportunities, they pour that energy into video games, porn, and sometimes nationalist content that can go very strange places and they start blaming other people.
Men fail when they're unable to provide for their family.
Romance is great, but it fades after a few years when the realities of life bite you.
And if you don't have the financial means to support each other, you're screwed.
Elon Musk is now worth more than the bottom 52% of households combined.
I think he once called you an insufferable numbskull.
I've been called worse.
I want him to make a trillion dollars.
I just want him to pay more than 15 or 18% tax rates.
Turning now to the issue of masculinity.
Young men in particular have not been treated well by our culture in recent years.
It's an issue I've spoken about and written about a lot.
Boys, and I've raised three of them, are raised to expect they'll grow into greedy men who will dominate boardrooms and menace women.
Society has demeaned their traditional jobs and their traditional family roles while condemning their instinctive traits as aggressive or toxic.
And while all of this has been happening, young men have guiltily receded into the gutter.
They're more likely to harm themselves, more likely to be kicked out of school, and more likely to fail in higher education.
Many of them seem utterly terrified of speaking to women.
Plenty of charismatic role models have stepped into this vacuum.
Not all of them are virtuous.
Professor Scott Galloway tackles all of it head-on in his excellent new book, Notes on Being a Man, and he joins me now.
Scott, great to have you back on Uncensored.
Pierce, thanks for having me on, and thanks for also bringing light to this issue over the last couple of years.
Yeah, you know, it's such a big issue.
And I think that I did a debate yesterday, actually, about toxic masculinity.
And I argued that it's never existed, that actually masculinity has been hijacked as a theme.
And people have tried to brand everything toxic masculinity, but that at its heart, masculinity has a lot of great things to admire about it.
If men behave badly, that doesn't mean that masculinity has grown toxic.
Yeah, I don't think there is such a thing as toxic masculinity.
There's cruelty, there's abusive power, there's violence, but toxic and masculinity are oxymorons.
I mean, masculinity is a social construct, as is femininity, and we get to decide how to fill that vessel.
I would argue that masculinity, the three stools of masculinity, are being a provider.
I think men in a capitalist society should assume at the outset of their careers they need to take economic responsibility for their household at some point, which, by the way, might mean at some point being more supportive and stepping out of the way of your partner who is better at that whole money thing.
I think that's also being masculine.
Two, the whole point of prosperity is to move to protection.
If you think of the most masculine jobs, firefighter, cop, military, at the end of the day, they protect.
And then finally, and this is a little bit to your point, procreation.
I think we have pathologized men wanting to have romantic and quite frankly sexual relationships.
And I think that fire can be of wanting to have sex, quite frankly, can be destructive.
It can lead to misogyny or violence.
But for the vast majority of men, their desire to have a physical and romantic relationship with someone channels them into a better man, dress better, smell better, have a plan, demonstrate kindness, develop the resilience to approach somebody knowing you may be rejected.
These are incredibly important attributes.
In addition, surveys show 80% of women still want men to express, to be the initiator of romantic interest.
And one of the scariest stats I've seen is that 45% of men 18 to 24 in America have never approached a woman in person.
And the most rewarding thing in life I will offer is to find a great partner and build a home of love and security and patriotism and self-worth.
And this starts with romantic interest.
I didn't look at my wife or my, I didn't look at a woman who became my partner, Pierce, and say, someday I'd like to have lower insurance rates.
I looked at her and thought, quite frankly, I would really enjoy spending time with her and possibly being physical with her.
So we need to stop pathologizing young men's interest in women in relationships and in sex.
Yeah, that's so true.
And I think these statistics about young men not having any connection with women, actual connection, many of them probably watching far too much porn online, sort of almost dehumanizing the whole thing, not having actual exposure to a dating process, any of that kind of thing.
This is a recipe for total disaster, particularly given that if you look at the totality of population issues around the world, as Elon Musk keeps warning people, we are heading towards a population disaster, not as some people have tried to argue, by having too many people for the planet, but by having too few.
Yeah.
Yeah, look, and the elephant in the room here, there's a lot of factors, sociological, economic, but what we're up against or what young men are up against is the deepest pocketed companies with godlike technology and quite frankly, medieval institutions trying to regulate them are essentially trying to sequester them from all their relationships, relationships from their friends, their parents, and potential romantic partners.
So 40% of the U.S. S ⁇ P now is now in the business of isolating and polarizing.
Why go through the effort of trying to make friends when you have Reddit in Discord?
Why would you put on a tie and go through the corporate BS of navigating a corporation when you can make money trading stocks or crypto on Robinhood or on Coinbase?
And why, Pierce, would you go through the effort, the humiliation, and the expense and the potential rejection of trying to establish a romantic partnership when you have literally lifelike synthetic porn available 24 by 7?
So unfortunately, unwittingly, moment by moment, we have created an economic interest, a huge economic interest, in what is effectively evolving a new species of asocial, asexual males.
It's as if we've attached the SMP to our own planned extinction.
Yet men between the ages of 20 and 30 are now spending less time outside than prison inmates.
And the number of people with kids, the number of 30-year-olds with a child in the house was 60% 40 years ago.
Today it's 27%.
And this is a variety of things, including male abandonment, including economic transfer of young people to older people.
So young people aren't as economically viable.
But I would argue the real delta over the last 23 to 30 years is a group of companies with unbelievable resources who are trying to convince you you can have a reasonable facsimile of life online with an algorithm.
And I worry that we end up with a generation that's obese, anxious, and not connecting to the key attribute of success for mammals, and that is to be in the presence of another mammal.
The Gillette Backlash00:02:49
And we're also seeing, you know, in terms of corporate America, for example, actions like we saw from Gillette.
At the kind of height of the Me Too campaign, which had many worthy aspects to it, as did the Times Time Up campaign.
You know, I certainly saw a merit in exposing a lot of very bad men for doing very bad things.
But as all with all these things, the pendulum swung wildly and hooked in a lot of people where I felt the punishment that they were receiving in terms of cancellation and so on way outdid what they were supposed to have done.
But you look at it in totality, all that, and I just saw a kind of reaction from Corporate America.
Gillette was a prime example where they'd always done these kind of chest beating alpha male style commercials that were a celebration of masculinity, a celebration of strong men often holding babies and so on, you know, being men,
being masculine with all the traits that we associate with being men, being hunters, providers, protectors, nurturers, you know, being stoic, being strong, being courageous, being risk-taking, all those kind of things, which I think make men, you know, great things, actually, within the vast majority of cases.
But Gillette spun that on its head.
And I write about this in my book, Woke is Dead, where they turned it on his head and almost were saying all men are awful until they can prove otherwise.
They ran a whole lot of footage of Harvey Weinstein and all this kind of thing.
And the presumption was men are not the best that they can be.
They have to prove they're not these awful Harvey Weinsteins.
And I, and listen, it backfired horrendously for them.
I think $8 billion later, off the bottom line, Gillette did a screeching U-turn and went back to celebrating men.
But it was the fact they taken that decision to kind of go that way in flipping things on its head and making men really hate themselves until they could prove otherwise.
Today's show is sponsored by Oxford Natural, makers of the Optimum Day and Optimum Night All Natural Supplements.
Thousands of Brits and Americans are already taking them with incredible results.
Optimum Day boosts your energy and supports weight loss throughout the day.
Optimum Night helps you relax and get deep, refreshing sleep.
They have countless success stories, including from some very familiar faces.
England legend Michael Owen, who lost £40.
AFTV's Robbie, who lost more than £100.
To watch their full stories and many more, scan the QR code on your screen or visit oxfordnatural.com slash peers.
And here's the best part: use the code peers and get 70% off your first order.
You're 70% off with the code PIERS.
Men Need Relationships More00:09:42
Yeah, so I would argue that the masculinity in young men have sort of been under attack from both sides of the political spectrum, but for different reasons.
The Gillette commercial you're referring to, where a man sees a woman he's attracted to and gets up to try and initiate contact, and then another man steps in between them and says, hey, that's not cool.
Well, okay, are lawyers supposed to meet in the lobby of MSNBC and negotiate a coffee date?
I mean, this is, I can't tell you, this is anecdotal evidence.
I don't have data here.
But when I go out and I'm in social settings, I've had dozens, I'm not exaggerating, of women come up to me and say, I'm here.
I'm single.
I'm ready to mingle.
I look amazing.
And not a single man has approached me in months.
And so the majority of women still want men.
One of the key attributes we have to teach our sons is how to express romantic interest while making the other person feel safe.
And also, if you go up to a stranger and express some sort of interest and they are not interested, guess what?
You're both going to be fine.
Now, the far right, to their credit, recognize the problem with young men first.
The unfortunate thing, though, is oftentimes their remedy is to take women and non-whites back to the 50s where they had less opportunity and that they inversely correlate the ascent of women with the descent of men.
And that's just not accurate.
At the same time, the left, their answer is to say, okay, men, you don't have problems.
You are the problem.
And the remedy is you should just act more like a woman.
And that's not the answer either.
I went to the Democratic National Convention.
And there was a parade of special interest groups.
But the only special interest group not given any airtime is the group that's fallen further fastest than any group in America.
And that's young men.
If you go into a morgue and there's five people who've died by suicide, four are men.
And I would argue, Pierce, that if we had any group killing itself at four times the rate of the control group, we'd weigh in with more empathy and programs.
And the reason, which begs the question, why don't we have more empathy for these young men and they're just their obvious struggles, it's because men of our generation, Pierce, registered so much, quite frankly, unfair advantage that we're holding them accountable.
From 1945 to 2000, a third of all economic growth took place in the U.S., which is 5% of the population.
And the majority of that prosperity was crammed into the third of us that were white, heterosexual, and male.
We did have unfair advantage.
I just want to acknowledge that, or I believe that.
But the question is, should a 19-year-old male that doesn't enjoy those advantages pay the price for my advantage?
Yeah, and I think that the, you know, Jonathan Haight's book about the emergence of smartphones in 2010 and the terrible, terrible impact that's had on mental health, particularly for young men, actually, where incidents of anxiety, depression, suicide, as he referenced, have all rocketed since 2010.
And I think a lot of it is because of the negative dopamine rush that everyone gets on their phone all day long from war zones and so on and whatever.
But also the kind of pressure that I think a lot of young people, particularly young men, I think, feel on social media from their peer group and the stuff that goes on there and the interactions via social media and so on.
It's all been very unhealthy and makes them even more anxious about life.
They're living up to aspirations they can ever probably achieve.
And then out of all this, you have the mix of people like Andrew Tate who kind of fill the vacuum and say, I'm here for you.
And, you know, you need to be fit.
I agree with him.
You need to be mentally strong.
I agree with him.
There's a lot of things I find myself nodding to when I interview Tate, right to the point when he starts his misogyny.
And the misogyny is exactly what you referenced earlier.
He wants to drag women back to the 50s.
He wants them to have no vote, no job, to stay at home, look after the family.
You know, he's basically taking everybody back 80 years.
And I hate that part of his message, whilst at the same time understanding why so many young men who feel completely disenfranchised are gravitating to all of his other message.
So you get these bad actors.
You step into the void, don't you?
You're absolutely right.
The message from the manosphere, what's considered the manosphere, starts off positive.
Be fit, be action-oriented, take responsibility, but then it kind of comes off the tracks.
We don't want to have an open and honest conversation because it offends some people.
And the honest conversation is that men still are expected to be economic providers.
Three-quarters of women say economic viability is key to their selection of a mate.
Men only say 25%.
It's that Chris Rock joke that Beyoncé could work at McDonald's and still marry Jay-Z, but the opposite is not true.
And when you have economic policies that consistently transfer wealth from a younger generation to an older generation, my generation is 72% wealthier than people of my age 40 years ago, whereas people under the age of 40 are 24% less wealthy.
And when a man can't provide or has a more difficult time providing or younger people have less money, it disproportionately impacts men because essentially men made socioeconomically horizontally and down, women horizontally and up.
And when the pool of horizontal and up keeps shrinking, fewer and fewer young people find relationships.
And the reality is, despite the cartoon of the 35 or 40 year old woman living with cats and sad and on a rainy day in her sweater, miserable, that's a cartoon.
Men need relationships more than women.
Widows are happier after their husband dies than when he was alive.
Widowers are less happy.
Women in relationships do live longer.
They live two to four years longer, but men live four to seven years longer in relationships.
If a man hasn't been married or cohabitated with a woman by the time he's 30, there's a one in three chance he'll be a substance abuser.
So I'm not suggesting loneliness is not an issue for women, but the data reflects one thing, and that is men need relationships more than women, and women still place a large emphasis on being an economic provider.
When the woman becomes in the relationship, starts making more money than the man in the marriages, the likelihood of divorce doubles and the use of erectile dysfunction drugs triples.
So distinct of the way the world should be, the reality is when men are not economically viable, they are not somewhat in general attractive to women, which creates a lack of household formation and a lack of propagation and population growth, which you referenced.
So one in three men under the age of 30 are in a relationship, two in three women are.
And you think, well, Scott, that's mathematically impossible.
It's not, Pierce, because women are dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
And you mentioned earlier about AI and porn and so on and how it's getting more sophisticated and therefore filling the void for a lot of these, you know, lonely guys sitting at home and so on.
I mean, it's going to get worse, that, because, you know, I was talking to Elon Musk last year about his optimus humanoid robots.
And I just jokingly say, can they have sex?
And he said, actually, they're pretty close.
Now, you can see a situation where literally robots would supplant for a lot of these lonely young guys who don't know how to interact with women.
They will become the partner, right?
Which obviously is a disaster for any population, any society.
But I could absolutely see that happening.
Technology in some ways and income inequality is returning us to what is actually standard practice in a society.
And that is, I think the greatest innovation in history was the American middle class.
And 7 million men returned from war.
They demonstrated heroics in uniform.
We stuffed money in their pockets through the GI Bill and the National Transportation Act.
And quite frankly, we made them very attractive to women.
And that resulted in the baby boom.
And there was so much prosperity and what I'll call secure-loving households that I think a lot of these people, men and women, said, we need to bring non-whites and women into this prosperity.
But if you look at the most violent, unstable societies in the world, they all have the same thing in common.
They have a disproportionate number of broke, lonely young men.
And when you have a situation as we're headed to right now, where the top 10% of men have extraordinary mating opportunities, you end up in a scenario of what I'd call Porsche polygamy, where the top 10% of males have extraordinary access to mating opportunities, which by the way does not lead to good behavior or incentives for long-term relationships.
And the bottom 90 are almost entirely shut out.
And a man without a relationship, and I don't mean to repackage this as violence, and I want to be clear, women do not have an obligation to serve men.
But the harsh reality is when men don't have romantic opportunities, they pour that energy into video games, porn, and sometimes nationalist content that can go very strange places and they start blaming other people.
They start blaming immigrants for their economic problems, women for the romantic problems.
Whereas most women, when they lack that romantic relationship, they will pour that energy into their friend network.
They're more relationally adept than men and also into their professional lives.
In sum, the hard reality, regardless of the way the world should be, the way the world is is the following.
The most dangerous person in the world is a young man who's not connecting to work or not connecting to relationships.
And we're producing millions of them in the West.
Blaming Immigrants for Failure00:15:30
Even things like, and I get pushback on this, the number of bars and pubs in the UK has declined by 40% since COVID.
And I think remote work is a disaster for young people.
You need one in three relationships begins at work, and 99% of them are consensual.
And also, I would argue that the risk to your 25-year-old liver of alcohol is dwarfed by the risk of social isolation.
I have jokingly say that my advice to young people is to get out more, get off your phone, drink more, and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off.
ExpressVPN is the simple way to protect your privacy online.
In the US, internet providers record your online activity and can sell your data.
In many countries, they've even legally required to store your information for years.
Along with millions of others, I use ExpressVPN to stop the tracking.
It hides your IP address and it routes all your activity through encrypted servers to keep advertisers and scammers from accessing your data.
You can choose the level of protection you need.
The basic plan is just $3.49 a month, less than 12 cents a day.
Right now, you can get an extra four months of ExpressVPN if you go to expressvpn.com slash peers to scan the QR code on the screen or go to expressvpn.com slash peers to get four additional months of service.
That's expressvpn.com slash peers.
Yeah, I completely agree.
I grew up in a pub.
I love pubs, but you're right.
And pubs are closing all over the place in the UK.
But pub life, you know, is what I loved about it and still love about it, it's very egalitarian.
You know, I grew up in a little village in the south of England where the Lord of the Manor would be next to the local bricklayer and so on.
And as long as you could stand your round, then you were, you know, part of the group and you would debate stuff.
And in many ways, you know, I look at what's happened today with the kind of fragmentation of discourse about stuff where people now seem incapable of having a kind of pub-style debate, where things would get animated, passionate, heated.
Sometimes they might even end in fistycuffs.
But nobody used to fall out over debates in a pub, really.
They'd always be back the next day, having another pint, having a laugh about the argument they'd had and so on.
We seem to have lost that ability, don't we?
That kind of pub culture mindset where you can agree to disagree, even if it's fiery, even if the debate is passionate.
We don't do that anymore.
Now, I thought Jon Stewart made a good point last week when he said that the idea he would disown family members, right-wing uncles on Thanksgiving because they have a political view, say they support Trump or something, when he knows they have some tremendous other values about them that he loves, he just thought that was ridiculous.
I completely agree with him.
Yeah, I think that I would argue the reality is we're actually not that divided, but the deepest pocketed companies in the world have attached profitability to trying to divide us.
And I think one of the most tragic things about AI, Pierce, is that it's not crawling the real world.
It's crawling the online world.
I mean, you have a bigger footprint than me, but when I go out, I can't get over no matter where I am.
Conservative, progressive, Europe, the U.S., Muslim country, wherever I go, I can't get over how lovely people are.
They come up to me and maybe they disagree with some of my statements.
I've been outspoken about Israel.
They say I disagree with you, but they want to have a civil conversation.
And they appreciate it or they come up, they say nice things.
Online, it is so ugly.
And essentially, it's not only because people are more emboldened, but you are where you spend time.
And what the algorithms have figured out is that if somebody says mRNA vaccines alter your DNA, that creates a lot of controversy online and a lot of comments.
And every comment is another Nissan ad and more shareholder value.
So the content that is most incendiary and divides us is elevated beyond its organic reach.
And I want to be clear, I'm not advocating for censorship, but when you take the most incendiary, hostile, divisive content and elevate it beyond the reach it would get organically, we become more divided and more polarized.
So I don't, I think we're going to look back on this era.
And one of the things we're really going to regret is that we let profit incentives and algorithms from big tech really pit us against one another.
You know, Americans now believe that their enemy isn't Russian troops pouring over the board or income inequality or the CCP or climate change.
They believe it's their neighbor is their enemy.
And this is just, this is tearing at the fabric of the United States.
We're food independent, energy independent, more economic growth in the last 10 years than all of Europe since World War II.
And yet we're tearing each other out from the inside because these algorithms have convinced us that the neighbor down the street who's a Trump voter is your enemy.
And my advice to any young person is to separate the person from the politics.
And even going back to mating, can you even remember what the political affiliations are of women you dated in your 20s?
We didn't even talk about it.
That just wasn't, it wasn't what we were concerned with.
And so what I've tried to do as someone who feels passionate about these topics is just separate the person from the politics.
What is the answer, Scott?
I mean, you've brilliantly dissected the problem here, particularly in relation to young men.
What is the answer?
I mean, what should we be doing now to solve the problems, particularly pertinent to young men?
I think there's a lot of common sense solutions.
And big tech and the incumbents will weaponize the illusion of complexity to pretend these problems are unsolvable.
They're not.
It starts at a very young age.
My Yoda on this issue is Richard Reeves.
He has some great suggestions around the educational infrastructure, which is biased against men.
Boys are twice as likely to be suspended for the same behavior as a girl, five times more likely if it's a black boy.
Boys are more immature.
Their prefrontal cortex is about a year and a half behind.
So one, red shirt boys, they start kindergarten at six, girls start at five.
More male teachers in K through 12.
Boys need male mentorship.
I think we need more vocational programming.
There's a lot of great mainstreet jobs that pay really well, that don't need a college degree that, quite frankly, most men, not all men, are better at.
I think we need to reform our tax policy that stops this sucking sound of capital from young to old.
The two biggest tax deductions in America are mortgage interest rate and capital gains.
Who makes their money buying and selling stocks?
People my age, who owns homes, people my age, who rents and makes their money from salary.
Young people, the $40 billion child tax credit gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill, but the $120 billion cost of living adjustment for Social Security flies right through.
We need to stop taking money out of their pockets and putting it in mine.
I think mandatory national service would be great for young men, Pierce.
It's a chance to meet friends, mentors, and mates and see how wonderful other Americans are from different ethnic backgrounds, different income backgrounds, different sexual orientation.
People in the West, whether it's Germany or the UK or the US, need to see that they're Americans, Germans, and Brits before they identify with their identity.
For God's sakes, we're Americans and Brits and Germans first.
And that's how we've built great societies is we link hands around each other.
Do we still, do women and non-whites still face tremendous obstacles?
Yes, but empathy is not a zero-sum game.
We can weigh in with programs that address this with young men.
They need more economic opportunity.
They need more men in school.
Young people as a whole need to be lifted up economically.
But we can absolutely address many of these problems.
And again, empathy is not a zero-sum game.
Gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage.
Civil rights didn't hurt white people.
We can still make progress on the very real issues facing non-whites and women in our countries while recognizing young men are really struggling.
You've got two sons, Alex who's 18 and Nolan is 14.
And you said that more than money, I want to give them a code to live by.
Religion, community, and workplace no longer provide the structure for boys and men they once did, which I think is absolutely correct.
When you talk to them, obviously at different stages of their teenage life, but when you talk to them, what advice do you just give them as a dad about how to navigate the modern world?
So to your point, I think everybody needs a code.
The world's complicated.
You're going to have to make dozens, if not hundreds of decisions a day, and you need some sort of framework to help you sort through these decisions.
And people used to get that code from the military, religion, national pride, maybe their family.
So I'd like to think masculinity can serve as a code to be a provider, a protector, and a procreator.
But as it relates to being a dad, I want to be clear.
I'm not sure I figured it out.
I really struggle a lot with my boys.
What I try to do is not to tell them anything, but to show them.
And I think having kids makes you a better man.
I find that I try harder to be kind and more patient with people.
I think the best thing a father can do for his sons is to be really loving and generous and kind to their mother.
I think that sets the right example.
And also, I do have these hacks.
I have these things called what a man does.
So for example, when visitors show up, we have a lot of visitors who come to our house, Pierce, in Marlebone in London.
I say a man immediately runs to their car or their taxi, gets their luggage and puts it in their room.
A man never pours his own water first.
A man, when he sees anybody being demonized, whether it's physically threatened or people talking critically about the behind their back, a man weighs in and defends that person.
And also, and I've gotten some pushback here, I tell my boys, when you're in the company of women, you always pay.
I think that essentially men benefit more from relationships.
The downside of sex is much greater for women.
Women's fertility window is much shorter than men's.
In some, her time is more valuable than yours.
And women are attracted to men who demonstrate valor and courage.
And one way you recognize that asymmetry and demonstrate valor is by saying, I'm serious, I appreciate your time.
And one easy way to do that is to pay.
So I have these hacks called what a man does, but more than anything, I just try to be a better man and hope they pick up on some of it.
If you owe back taxes to the IRS, they can garnish your wages and levy your bank accounts.
They can even seize your retirement or take your home.
Don't let the IRS target you.
Call the professionals at Tax Network USA.
The top tax lawyers and enrolled agents are experts in the powerful programs that can help you to eliminate your tax debt.
Tax Network USA is A-plus rated and has saved more than a billion dollars for their clients.
Whether you owe thousands or millions, one phone call can start the process of taking control.
But you need to act now while you have options for a free consultation called Tax Network USA Today at 1-800-958-1000.
Or visit tnusa.com/slash peers.
Don't let the IRS be the first to act.
You know, I always make a point of standing up if a woman looks towards the table I'm sitting at in a restaurant or something.
And it's interesting because a lot of women now will say, oh, wow, that's really, you know, they're really surprised, which makes me understand that it doesn't happen that much, right?
That men don't uniformly do this.
When I was young, all men would do that.
As a matter of course, common courtesy towards a woman, if you were a man, was just an accepted part of society.
Now it's like a surprise when men behave like that.
I think that's such a shame.
I think men should be more chivalrous and more respectful and more polite like that.
I think that would go a long way to, you know, hitting back perhaps at this characterization that all things masculine are toxic and all men are awful.
It's like, well, actually, you know, you can have simple little ways that cost no money.
I happen to agree with you about paying the bill.
But notwithstanding that, you don't have to, it doesn't cost anything to be polite, to be chivalrous, to be, to open a door for a lady, let her go through first, or an elevator or a revolving door, whatever it may be.
Just be that guy.
There are a lot of studies showing why women are attracted to men.
And the first is, and we, again, don't like to talk about this, his ability to signal resources.
And one way you can signal resources if you show up with a panorama and a Range Rover, but you can also signal resources by, quite frankly, just having your act together.
You're not the guy that parties till two in the morning.
You go home because you have something going on the next day, right?
You have a plan.
You're in vocational training to learn how to install energy-efficient HVAC heaters.
You have a plan and will someday be able to provide them.
Two, protection.
And one means of protection is you show that you're essentially have good manners.
And so number one is signaling resources.
Number two is intellect.
Because generally, instinctively, people who make good decisions for the tribe, the tribe's more likely to survive.
The fastest way to communicate intelligence, humor.
And I'm, again, half joking, and this is snarky, but my impression of a woman is the following.
I'm laughing, I'm laughing, I'm naked.
The only way I ever got dates as a young man was I could make women laugh.
And I found that if I could make a woman laugh, that she would go on a date with me.
And then the third thing that women are most attracted to in a potential romantic partner is the secret weapon because men don't acknowledge this and the manosphere ignores it.
And it's the following: it's kindness.
And that is women believe instinctually at some point they might be vulnerable because of gestation or because they're smaller and want someone who is fundamentally a kind person and demonstrates that by expressions of generosity to people who can do nothing for him.
And what I would argue, and I speak to this personally, I wasn't a very kind person.
I didn't have that kind gene.
But what I suggest to all men is you develop a kindness practice like working out, where it becomes second nature.
What you're saying, stand up when people approach the table, open doors, walk around to the other side of the car and let people in.
Open doors for people.
Just make it second nature.
And women will notice that.
I mean, one, you should do it just to be a good human.
But in the context of trying to find a mate, I do believe the secret weapon for men is a kindness practice where people just observe you're a decent man and that you go out of your way to try and add surplus value and that you are willing and aspire to give more than you get.
That is the secret weapon in mating.
And I think that starts, that kindness practice starts with really good manners, as you referenced.
Marriage as a Business00:07:36
Yeah, completely agree.
Scott, your book, Notes on Being a Man, is currently number one bestseller on Amazon.
Doesn't surprise me.
Some of the bestsellers in the parenting boys category.
It's such an important book for its time.
And I say that as someone who's raised three sons who are fantastic young men.
But as you say, being a father is complicated.
It's difficult.
That balance between being their friend, their mentor, their advisor, their critic sometimes, all these things take careful navigation.
But I do think it's incumbent on society to make men feel good about themselves and proud of being men and proud of being masculine.
And I think everybody benefits.
The young men benefit from that and women will benefit from having a group of men in society that live up to that ideal.
So I hope everyone goes and reads it.
We're going to turn to a few other issues now.
And we're going to be joined.
This is in the aftermath, particularly of Charlie Kirk's death.
Most people agreed that wild rhetoric and partisan hate had gone too far.
They didn't agree on which side is most responsible for it.
And they don't seem to have taken the temperature down, as we've just discussed.
The president still routinely characterizes a fascist dictator or a Nazi.
Zeram Mamdani just become New York City mayor, despite opponents calling him, quote, a communist jihadist who hates America.
Many Brits are now told they're facing an inevitable civil war, mostly due to content on X, whose owner, Elon Musk, could become a trillionaire under his Tesla pay deal.
And joining me and Scott to discuss some of these issues is Shark Tank investor and chairman of O'Leary Ventures, Kevin O'Leary.
Kevin, welcome to you.
Welcome back to Uncensored.
Great to be here.
Thank you.
I just had an absolutely riveting conversation with Scott about his book, Notes on Being a Man.
I don't know how much of that you did or didn't hear, but regardless, what is your view of, you know, what does it mean to be a man for you?
Well, you know, I sort of look at it for the perspective also, you know, with kids.
And I've been married a long time.
I think you find a role as a provider at the beginning, because my perception about, you know, marriage, the family unit, the role of a man and a woman is this may sound crass, but you're creating a business.
Marriages fail.
Men fail when they're unable to provide for their family.
Financial stress is the number one reason for failed marriages in America.
It's not infidelity.
It's the stress of financial issues.
And the reason I know this, I'm actually in the prenup business.
I have a business called Hello Prenup.
It's actually a shark tank deal.
It's wildly successful.
It helps women do due diligence on their potential partners to determine whether or not they can survive financially.
That's what a prenup does.
It forces you to ask those tough questions.
And very often at the prenup stage, in discovery, you end up in a situation where you realize, well, there's a lot of romantic aspects I like, but there's no ability to finance a family successfully.
And those, that's something you want to know before you get into a situation where you end in divorce four years later because you can't provide for each other.
And so that's very important.
But I also agree on just chivalry is dead.
I heard some of the conversation.
I think it's great when you can be a kind person.
I think in this world today, there's nothing wrong with that.
And that's good for everything.
But I think today, particularly in the world the way it is, finance actually determines the outcome of successful pairings more than romance does.
Romance is great.
But it fades after a few years when the realities of life bite you.
And if you don't have the financial means to support each other, you're screwed.
What do you think of that, Scott?
I largely agree.
And he's right.
So first off, I've been doing a lot of studies around the challenges facing young men.
And as we referenced, men are committing suicide at four times the rate as women.
And the zone of greatest vulnerability of self-harm for a man is the year after he gets divorced.
He loses his primary relationship, oftentimes access to his kids.
One in three men don't have, don't see their kids at all after six years post-divorce.
And to Kevin's point, the primary driver of divorce is economic anxiety.
I would argue that in a modern day where now our sisters and our mothers have finally had access to some of the same professional opportunity we've had, that it requires an upfront conversation around alignment.
And there are some households, 17% of households now, the woman is making more money than the men.
It's going to get much higher when you look at rates of graduate school attendance disproportionately over-indexing for women now.
But I think the key is to just get alignment and have a transparent conversation.
But I do think what it goes to is larger public policy, and that is the income inequality and transfer of wealth from young to old, which has been extraordinary over the last 40 years.
As I referenced in the previous segment, Kevin, 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.
A lack of economic opportunities for young people and a tax policy that continues to transfer money from young to old has been disproportionately hard on men who are still looked to disproportionately in terms of their self-worth and the way society evaluates them based on their economic viability.
And by the way, women are disproportionately and unfair, unfairly evaluated on their aesthetics.
But when the economy is tilted against young people, it's especially hard, I think, on men and takes a real toll on mating.
And also what it comes down to is that men need relationships more than women.
Men benefit more from marriage than women.
We were saying there's a cartoon around women being lonely.
Well, actually, it does more damage on a man when he's not in a relationship.
But to your point, Kevin, and I agree with you, a lot of this comes down to just economic policy.
And one of the things I think would benefit men the most would actually be universal childcare.
Because in order to survive in this incredibly expensive inflationary environment, you probably need dual incomes.
And in order to do that, I think we need to be the last nation of the G7 to offer universal childcare such that we can unlock more women into the workplace who have a tendency now to get more professional certification than men.
And in many ways, are better suited for an information economy.
And it was a bit of a word salad to say I agree with you that economics are driving a lot of the problems and that the knock-on effects of men not making seeing their salaries decline has a real issue here.
And that is men made socioeconomically horizontally and down, women horizontally and up.
And when the pool of men who are horizontal and up economically keeps shrinking, there's just fewer men that women perceive as economically and emotionally viable mates.
AI Pressure on Economics00:03:02
Yeah, it's really fascinating this.
I mean, Kevin, you've said that three years ago you thought AI was hype, that you don't believe that anymore.
It's pretty obvious.
It's coming fast and furious at us.
AI is going to put even more pressure, I think, on that economic part of a relationship you talk about because it will take a lot of jobs.
You know, as you see it now exploding, AI, just take me forward five years.
What do you think the world's going to look like in five years' time?
And how will that impact, do you think, directly on men and their ability to sustain marriage and relationships and so on if a number of them are replaced by robots, for example?
You know, I've actually had a chance now for almost two years to see the use of AI across all 11 sectors of the economy.
And as you said, you know, two years ago, I thought the whole thing was hype because I didn't see any use case that was productive versus the investment required to actually implement it.
Now I do, and I realize that what it's going to do is change the nature of the workforce over time.
I'll give you, I guess, a couple of examples.
Think about on the most basic industry that's already been proven.
It's been around for hundreds of years, the insurance industry.
You write an insurance policy, and what you have to do is determine the risk, because the whole thing about insurance is when you write a policy, you're taking on risk for whether it's a hurricane or a watch is stolen or jewelry is stolen, whatever it is.
And insurance companies that have been around for a long time have a lot of data about this.
They know by the zip code.
It's a highly regulated industry.
And the reason I know this is I've gotten involved in it myself.
I'm a huge watch advocate, horology.
Watch insurance is complicated because now in the last 30 years, watches haven't depreciated anymore.
No one needs a watch, but they buy it as a form of marking time or success in their lives or jewelry.
But you buy a Rolex and lo and behold, 10 years later, it's worth four times what you paid for it.
And insurance doesn't cover for that.
There's no replacement insurance or very little of it in home policies.
So here's AI at work.
Two years ago to write that policy, it took people, insurance underwriters, weeks to determine what the risk was going to be and shuffling a lot of paper and then issuing an offer, policy offer.
Today, scraping data, zip code by zip code, I can issue that policy in nine seconds and send it back to the retailer that's selling the watch right in the POS system.
That's called WonderCare.
We did that using AI.
Now, our risk rates are even lower because we're able to scrape data over 100 years of theft right on your city block.
That was impossible 24 months ago.
The margins in the insurance industry specific to that are going up 15%.
Job Destruction vs Creation00:12:38
The productivity is higher.
That's one use case I think is easy to understand.
Now, what about all those insurance adjusters you would ask?
Where do they fit?
Well, they don't fit in the model anymore here.
They're going to fit somewhere else in perhaps medical insurance, which requires a lot more diligence than a watch does, or somewhere else in the feeding chain, but it's going to change what they do.
Here's another one.
Very simple to understand.
Most people don't even think about this.
There are thousands of big box retailers in England and in the United States.
And every year, someone has to get up on a ladder and walk on the roof and see where the tar has fallen off or the HVAC unit is broken or the antenna is weak or whatever it is.
They have to risk their lives doing that and do it every single year because that's part of their maintenance.
Today, that's done with a 6K drone that actually flies a grid over the roof and compares using AI what the roof looked like 12 months ago, right down to the square inch.
The minute it sees something awry that needs repaired, it automatically, right from a satellite, generates the work order to the property manager, and the next day someone's fixing it.
I mean, you can't make that stuff up, but it's happening right now.
And how do I know that?
I invested in the company that flies the drones.
So those are a lot of high-paying jobs just created.
It's called Fly Guys.
They hire pilots to fly drones all over the country.
High-paying job and lots and lots of openings.
And so AI taketh, but it also giveth.
And it gives high-paying jobs in the engineering side, in this case, of drone pilots.
So, you know, the jury is still out in terms of how much it's going to affect the economy.
I tend to think it's the old story about TV is going to kill the radio.
Nothing farther from the truth.
Radio exists successfully, both terrestrial and from satellites, and so does television.
And it too is morphing into different streaming technologies.
Technologies create opportunities, not always wipe out, you know, what people do.
And lastly, in 20 years, a lot less human beings will be killed in wars.
A lot more drones will be shot down and robots will be set on fire.
I think that's what's going to happen.
And I believe the country with the best AI is going to win all the wars because they'll have the best robotic armies and drone armies and missile armies and satellite detection.
And right now, China is winning that race, not the United States.
And the reason they're winning is they have more power.
There's no policy that stops the supreme leader there from building another coal-fired electrical plant and putting a data center behind it and beside it.
And that's exactly what's going on.
We can't do that here.
We're falling behind.
Fascinating.
Scott, AI.
I mean, two things I would say that I've said a lot on this show over the years.
One is I did the last interview with Professor Stephen Hawking before he died on television, and he said that the biggest threat to mankind was when artificial intelligence learns to self-design.
Cut forward to a guy I saw on Bill Maher's show a few weeks ago, who's an AI expert, who told the story of six AIs being told we're replacing you as part of a test.
And five of them immediately trawl company executive email accounts for information they could use to blackmail them to stop being replaced.
Now, that seems to me that we are extremely close to the potential Armageddon that Stephen Hawking was talking about of AI thinking for itself.
How concerned are you about that?
Attention podcast, people.
I'm Harry Cole, and I'm invited to something properly different.
Something urgent, something real.
It's called Harry Cole Saves the West.
If you're tired of limp commentary and afraid to offend punditry, then this is the show for you.
We're taking sledgehammers to sacred cows and battling the malign forces tearing apart the US and UK.
From open borders to cultural collapse to economic chaos to the threats to national security, the values and freedoms of the West are under siege like never before.
This is the show where American grit meets British backbone.
We all defend faith, family, freedom, and the future of the West with bold, unapologetic truth-telling.
So if you're ready to push back, ready to stand tall, ready to laugh at the madness, then hit subscribe.
Harry Cole Saves the West right now.
Available wherever you get your podcasts.
The fight back starts here.
And yes, bring the popcorn.
Well, just some fine print here.
If I disagree with Stephen Hawking, your audience would be smarter to defer to what Stephen Hawking believes.
So just let me acknowledge that up front.
I'm a bit of an AI optimist.
I think if you look at the cadence of every technology or any innovation in a modern economy, it follows the same pattern.
And that is there's some catastrophizing in the short run.
There is some job destruction.
You know, the Queen wanted to outlaw weaving machines because weaving was the biggest employer of women in the UK.
The Luddites literally were a group of people who broke into factories and destroyed machines because they were putting people out of work.
And to Kevin's point, I just don't think you can get in the way of innovation and technology.
Automation was supposedly going to wreck employment on the factory floor in the global auto industry.
And there was some short-term job destruction on the factory floor.
But we didn't anticipate heated car seats or car stereos.
And now there are more jobs in the global auto industry that there were before.
So there will be job destruction on kind of information-intensive rote tasks.
At the same time, it'll hopefully free up margin and capital to invest in new opportunities.
I can't imagine there aren't going to be a ton of interesting healthcare companies that use a layer of AI to make people's lives easier.
The mother of a child with diabetes, and let's be honest, it's always the mother, spends five months of her year managing that child's diabetes between the referrals, the specialists, going to the drugstore, arguing with the insurance company.
You got to think at some point AI is going to crawl her emails and the prescriptions and upload the health documents and the blood work of the kid and be able to give the mother one, two, three months of her life back a year for self-care, for making more money.
And companies will make, will begin to hire and find new opportunities.
Now, the problem is the V of the initial job destruction may be really severe around AI.
You're already seeing pretty significant layoffs amongst the companies that logically adopted AI first, specifically big tech.
And the issue is, at least in the U.S., we're not as good or as empathetic around the people on the wrong trade, on the wrong side of the trade around innovation.
And that is, Denmark spends 2% of its GDP in retraining.
We spend 0.2%.
We're very much winners and losers.
And people might argue that's a good thing.
The faster you can fire, the faster you can rehire.
But the real danger, in my view, of AI is not that it becomes sent in and decides to kill us.
I think there's always an off switch.
It's not job destruction.
I think over the medium and long term, it'll actually create more jobs.
It's loneliness.
And that is we're training a new generation of young people, specifically young men who are more receptive to kind of DOPA-induced content and also are having a tougher time establishing relationships with work, with education, and with women.
We're trying to convince them they can have a reasonable facsimile of life online using AI-driven algorithms.
And I think slowly but surely, we're sequestering men from the rest of society.
There's a stat now saying that men ages 20 to 30 are spending less time outdoors than prison inmates.
And the idea of synthetic, lifelike porn being offered to a 17-year-old male.
Now, I went to UCLA and the only reason I graduated or barely graduated or one of the reasons was that I wanted to go on campus, hang out with my friends, and potentially meet women.
And if I'd had these frictionless, synthetic relationships offering me lifelike porn or letting me meet interesting people on Reddit or maybe just being super nice to me and never offering any friction or any problems, the only thing the most rewarding things in your life will have in common is that they're really hard.
And the most rewarding things are the hardest things, specifically relationships.
And we're effectively trying to give these young people a frictionless form of life where over time they don't establish the skills to establish those relationships and they never really understand what real victory is like.
We're mammals and see what happens when you sequester mammals from other mammals.
Put an orca in a tank, see what happens alone.
The worst thing you can do to a human is solitary confinement.
Leave your dog alone without another dog or a human and sees what happens.
So I think the biggest threat of AI is trying to convince young people they can sequester from the rest of society.
And I think they wake up depressed, obese, and anxious.
So just moving to solutions, I don't think synthetic relationships should be allowed for people under the age of 18.
And I think that also synthetic porn is a real challenge to our young men.
I don't think you can prohibit it, but we should absolutely age gate it.
We age gate the military, drinking, and certain types of content.
So I'm more worried about an increase in what I would refer to as a loneliness epidemic, where we're becoming less mammalia with these frictionless relationships that will only get much, much worse with synthetic AI relationships.
Kevin, I just want to ask you specifically, you talked about China leading the race here with AI.
Probably the greatest AI warrior that America has to try and stop that happening is Elon Musk.
He's just had a pay package approved by Tesla shareholders, the biggest corporate pay package in history, could make him a trillionaire over 10 years if he meets the targets.
You know, he's a very divisive character, Elon Musk.
He's, I think, deliberately controversial, he likes stirring the pot.
He's also clearly a genius.
I don't think there's much doubt about that.
What do you feel about this?
I mean, we talked earlier with Scott and I about the disparity between the very, very wealthy now in the world and the poorest members of society getting ever bigger.
And yet at the same time, someone like Elon might be the way that America can try and compete and win this war with China, which may guarantee the futures of so many Americans.
So let's take the pay package, which I understand is controversial, obviously.
I'm a Tesla shareholder.
I approve of that pay package because if you actually read it, very few people have, I did.
These targets are extraordinary.
I mean, if he actually achieves this, he'll create the most valuable company in history.
So it's a very, very, very difficult mountain he's going to climb there.
Very specific to unit volumes and profitability and everything else.
So I, as a shareholder, if he even achieves half of what he's promising, I'm going to do very, very well.
And he'll create a company that has a really large platform of technology beyond just Tesla cars driving around.
So that's quite a vision.
That's what you're buying into.
I will point out that last time this was discussed five years ago, everybody said his pay package was insane and he hit every target.
So, and he's been blocked in court from receiving that compensation, which I think is outrageous because he made a contract with his board, and I think it'll get resolved through litigation, but it's a shame that he has to go through that.
He achieved what he said he was going to do.
Now, you know, the contest with China is, I think it's now out in the open.
People realize that China is going for all the marbles.
They want world dominance as an economy, and they want it militarily, and they're not going to let anybody stop them.
That's their position right now.
And so they come and look at the Trump administration, realizing they got 36 more months of it, where their view is much longer.
US Energy Dominance Thesis00:04:56
But there is no question, as you saw that attack in the Middle East nuclear power facility, very few people were involved in that.
It was done by remote control.
It was the first of its kind.
A lot of it was AI-driven from space.
The targeting was very precise.
The ordinance was all designed specifically for that attack to damage doors and everything else and very, very well delivered.
It had political ramifications, but that's a taste of what warfare is going to look like in the future.
And so if you have the Starlink network, you've got the satellites, you've got the AI, you have the technology to build the ordinance, the missiles, which are smart missiles, and the robots that will go fight the war for you to take over a town or village.
It sounds pretty futuristic, but it's not.
And I think what has to happen, and this is my own opinion, and I'm certainly investing this way, even though there's a lot of rhetoric about tariffs and everything else right now, the only choice the United States has as the leading economy now is to get bigger.
Figure out a way to get bigger and be able to spend 5% to 7% of the GDP to do nothing except defense.
And this is kind of an interesting situation because the country they're going to do that with, most likely, is one they're in a huge adversarial battle with right now, and that's Canada.
It's geolocked to the world's largest economy, the United States.
And so if I were a policymaker in the U.S., I would propose a different path with Canada.
The same deal the indigenous races have in both the United States and Canada.
There is no border for them.
They walk both ways, and they always have for over 200 years.
And so, okay, you know, you're sitting around saying, I'll make a deal with you, Canada.
We don't have to buy your country, because that hasn't gone over very well, as you're well aware.
But, well, there's no tariffs on anything.
We want to join the economies, standardize on the American dollar, as long as you agree to spend 5% of GDP, not defending the 49th parallel, defending the North against the Chinese.
And let the Chinese know, don't mess with us, because we are going to spend 5% to 7% of our economy's behemoth size, which would be very competitive, because now you have the largest market with all of the natural resources it needs and power security going forward.
And you let the Chinese government, I have nothing wrong with the Chinese people, it's its government that has these ambitions.
Look, this is how it's going to work.
You're going to play nice, and we're going to have a relationship on trade.
But if you mess with us, the outcome will be pretty bad for you.
And the only way you get to do that is have those defense technologies there and be ahead in AI.
And it's going to be very soon that this realization happens, very soon.
And I'm well aware of policy going back and forth between the Canadian and American government, because as you know, I invest on both sides of the border.
So I have to know this stuff.
I spent a lot of time in Washington and certainly a lot of time in Canada.
They want to work something out.
And if it's not going to be on this cycle, it's going to be soon, because these Chinese guys aren't going to stop.
And the first taste of this will be an attempt to take over chip technology if Taiwan gets on the drawing board.
You have to be able to stop that from happening until we have our ability to make those chips ourselves domestically in North America.
So I'm kind of a bit of a futurist on this one, but I'm investing that way.
I'm putting large amounts of capital into power generation with the assumption that the lowest cost power wins.
And who's got the lowest cost power in North America right now?
Alberta, Canada.
6 trillion cubes of stranded natural gas.
Unlimited resources there.
Nobody has anything like that.
And I think that's why you heard Trump talk about turning Alberta into a state.
He knows what they have.
They're not going to agree to do that.
But the country's loaded with that kind of power, both electrical, nuclear, and gas and oil.
So anyways, that's a thesis.
That's an investment thesis to gnaw on.
Do you know what?
Whenever I interview you guys, either together, singularly, whatever, I always learn so much.
Asymmetric Benefits of Trade00:09:05
That's why I love having you on on Censor.
Scott, let me just come to you about Elon Musk.
I think he once called you an insufferable numbskull, which frankly, I would see as a badge of honor.
You had a spat with him.
He's unpredictable.
He can be like that.
He can throw off the insults just like Trump does and so on.
He is a genius.
What do you make of this?
I mean, funny enough with Starlink, for example.
I fly almost always transatlantic with British Airways.
I've been very loyal, despite the fact their Wi-Fi in recent years has absolutely sucked.
And I started posting about this saying, for goodness sake, British Airways, get Starlink.
And I started doing this a lot.
My last six, seven flights, no Wi-Fi.
And eventually they announced last week that they are moving British Airways to Starlink for their Wi-Fi from 2026.
And they actually included one of my posts of complaint in which I copied in Elon in their promo announcement.
So I felt very proud that I almost single-handedly persuaded British Airways to get with the movement.
But Starlink is an incredible thing.
Notwithstanding the insufferable numbskull comment, what is your view of Elon Musk?
Is he worth this kind of money?
Is he going to save us or destroy us?
So first off, I've been called worse.
Look, I've served on seven public company boards.
The hardest thing a board member has to do is compensation.
You want to keep the CEO motivated at the same time.
CEO pays gone from 30 to 50 times the average salary workers to 300.
And the reason why is because you end up knowing the CEO, he or she is very likable.
And then a consulting firm comes in and does an assessment of similar size companies and they go zero to 100 compensation for a similar company, 50 being average.
And generally what happens is you say, well, Bob or Lisa is a good guy or gal, they're doing a good job.
We'll pay them at 70, which might not sound weird.
When you go 1.4 times the average, and by the way, the average is pretty high for CEO compensation.
You end up with an exponential effect where CEOs have massively outpaced the American worker in terms of compensation.
I think I would have a difficult time philosophically wrapping my head around a compensation package that could be a trillion dollars.
Having said that, I think one of the wonderful things about capitalism is there aren't really a ceiling or upward limits on your compensation.
I think that's a powerful motivator and one of the reasons people immigrate to the United States.
And philosophically, I actually don't have a problem with this.
If he creates, Kevin was saying, if he creates $7 to $8 trillion in incremental value, that he's going to get, I guess, about 12 or 15% of it.
That's not an unreasonable trade, philosophically.
If Tim Cook went to Apple shareholders and said, I want a trillion dollars, if I make this company worth $15 trillion, not four, I would argue that the shareholders wouldn't be outraged or wouldn't be irrational to consider that.
Where I have an issue is the following, and that is I want someone to make a trillion dollars.
I just think they should pay a greater tax rate.
And that is someone like Elon Musk, who has become very wealthy based on his genius and his risk-taking, but also on tax credits funded by middle-class taxpayers.
When we're spending $7 trillion on $5 trillion in receipts, the bottom line is, do we have to cut spending or increase tax revenue?
The answer is yes.
And corporations are paying their lowest taxes since 1939.
The 25 wealthiest families pay an average tax rate of 6%.
Elon Musk is now worth more than the bottom 52% of households combined.
I think that we just need greater incremental marginal tax rates.
And also, I don't think, I think what you want is taxes that are least taxing.
And what Daniel Kahneman, who's an intellectual role model of mine, states in his wonderful work is that once you get to a certain point of wealth, above that, you don't get any incremental happiness.
So the fact that Elon Musk can kind of piece it out and become a resident of Texas and end up, and I've done this personally.
When I was making hundreds of thousands of dollars in my 30s and 40s, I've always made an exceptional living.
I've been very blessed, and I'm not modest.
I'm hardworking and talented.
I was paying 40 plus percent in tax rates.
When I made the jump to light speed and had enough capital to start investing and became very wealthy by most people's standards, my tax rate plummeted.
And I don't think that's the way to operate a nation.
I think you need a progressive tax structure.
So I would love to see someone make a trillion dollars.
I just think we need to go back to the last century where we were charging 50, 60% plus tax rates because that person isn't going to get any less happy.
But if you're able to reinvest that money in new technologies that support American households, education, universal child care, I think that you end up with a lot more civic prosperity.
In sum, I want them to make a trillion dollars.
I just want them to pay more than 15 or 18 percent tax rates.
And Kevin mentioned Canada and China.
I would argue that these sclerotic, irrational tariffs have thrust a lot of nations who traditionally weren't friends with China, have thrust them into their hands.
The most chilling image of 2025 was Modi, Xi, and Putin all acting like they're at a fraternity party.
And it didn't need to happen.
Japan, South Korea, and China are having trade talks for the first time in a long while.
The Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, is on a tour through Asia.
24% of Chinese exports used to come into China.
Now it's 17.
They're diversifying away from us.
And effectively, these tariffs were supposed to inspire a flurry of deal making.
And they are.
Unfortunately, the deal making is outside of the U.S. People are reconfiguring their supply chains to avoid the U.S., who they feel they can't count on.
They don't understand the tariff policy.
It seems to be based on the blood sugar level of a president and his chief economist who, quite frankly, is citing people who don't exist in economic papers.
And we have seen throughout economic history, tariffs are an elegant way to reduce prosperity.
As it relates to Canada, 70% of their exports come to the U.S.
It's like that animal house line.
You effed up.
You trusted us.
They have based a big portion of their economy on good relationships with the U.S.
It's the largest undefended border in the world.
And yet we have decided to declare economic warfare on them.
And it's not only, you know, there's nothing, the only thing worse than fighting with your allies is fighting without them.
They've been amazing allies for us.
And to think that we're just, quite frankly, messing with them this much is just not very smart.
In addition, if you just look at free trade, I agree with Kevin, we should have free trade with Canada.
We Americans asymmetrically benefit.
They import into the U.S. low margin products, lumber, petroleum, oil, operating margins of 10 to 20%, companies that trade at a P multiple of 20.
We import into Canada high margin products, iPhones, cars, electronics that have 30 to 40 points of operating margin with companies that trade at multiples of a P multiple of 30.
In other words, for every dollar we make from products we ship into Canada, we get about $3 in shareholder value.
They get about one.
So if there's any asymmetry in free trade that accretes to one partner, it asymmetrically benefits the U.S.
So not only is this waving our middle finger in an amazing ally, it's just economically stupid what we have done.
So in addition, it just, if you want to talk about a great ally, I love the question posed to his friend, Warren Buffett, a Holocaust survivor.
He said, how do you know if someone's your friend?
And she responded, she asked herself, would they hide me?
I mean, that's a really puncturing question.
And here's the bottom line.
As it relates to America and Canadians being our friend, they hit us.
1979, Iranian hostage crisis, Canadian diplomats held Americans, hid them, and then got them out of the country safely and then stayed behind at huge personal risk to them.
It's just striking to me that we would be this damaging and this hostile towards a nation that has been such an incredible friend to the United States.
So I would argue that the Trump administration tariff policies are not only inconsistent and unpredictable, they're just baseline stupid.
On that bombshell, I'm going to bring things to a close.
Fascinating conversation with both of you, Scott and Kevin.
Thank you both very much indeed for joining my, I could do that for hours, but sadly have to wrap.
But thank you both very much.
Take care.
Thank you.
Thanks, Pierce.
Thanks, Kevin.
Canada: Friend or Foe00:00:24
Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent.
The only boss around here is me.
You enjoy our show.
We ask for only one simple thing.
Hit subscribe on YouTube and follow PiersMorgan Uncensored on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate, and entertain.
And we'll do it all for free.
independent on censored media has never been more critical and we couldn't do it Without you.