Professor Scott Galloway

Yeah. So I've never had more imposter syndrome. The smartest fear.

Thank you for that impossible bar, especially getting getting my message out less than 90 seconds. My co-host is constantly saying, like, wrap it up. She's constantly going, come on, put a period at the end of the sentence, bring it home, land this, land this plane. Anyway, it's great to be here.

Well, thank you for being generous.

Well, I have the petty stuff. I hate passwords, reservations, shoelaces, keys. These aren't petty grievances. I want to be the good guys. I've moved to London, and I always thought as an American that I was the good guy. And I just feel like in the last 110 days, we've lost that. And that I think Americans are going to register a huge decline in our prosperity.

I don't think we've really acknowledged how fortunate we are to have attracted the best and brightest. Everybody in the world had one thing in common. If they're ambitious, they wanted to come to America. And I don't think that's any longer the case. I think we took for granted our rights. I think we took for granted our prosperity. I mean, I've been very open.

I struggle with anger and depression, so my grievances are kind of with me all the time. I see grievance in everything. So if we're going to talk about grievance, we're going to need a bigger boat. But yeah, I have a long list of things I'm upset and triggered about.

So there's a lot there. So let's talk about trying to bring back manufacturing jobs, funding of universities and universities in general. I've been very critical of higher ed. I think there's real issues with higher ed, and that is me and my colleagues have become so drunk on exclusivity and self-aggrandizement and arrogance that we have artificially constrained supply.

Dartmouth has an $8 billion endowment. They let in 500 kids, what a good Starbucks does in a day, so they can feel important. Their alumni like it because the value of their degree goes up. And how many times have you heard your friends say, I would never get into the university I went to if I applied today, and then they laugh and giggle like it's funny? That means your daughter's not getting in.

And we create so much unnecessary manufactured stress elite universities and their faculty and administrators, of which I'm a part of, deciding that we're no longer public servants. We're fucking Chanel backs. It's immoral. It is not American. When I applied to UCLA, the admissions rate was 74%. Now it's 9%.

The son of a single immigrant mother who lived and died as secretary, yours truly, would not get into UCLA now, which started an upward spiral for me, and it's the reason I'm here today. So I think that higher education in many ways has become morally corrupt. We have an anti-Semitism problem at our early universities.

We've become so left-wing and become so sensitive to the injustices of the past that we crudely assess who are the oppressors. We go on the hunt for fake oppressors, and we've decided that the whiter you are and the richer you are, the more likely you are to be an oppressor. And fairly or unfairly, we have decided the ground zero for rich and white is Jews.

And if I'd gone down to the NYU Plaza and said half the things that were said about Jews after October the 7th, if I went down and said, lynch the blacks, or if I went down and said, burn the gays, my faculty ID would have been shut off within the day, and I would never be in academia.

But the things that are said by Jews, what ends up at elite universities is that free speech is never free, or as long as it's hate speech about Jews. I do think it's being addressed. I do think it's a problem. Now, going to this notion that we're going to bring back great manufacturing jobs on return to universities in second and anti-Semitism.

The average iPhone assembler in China makes $500 a month. The average employee in Cupertino at Apple makes $210,000 a year.

We have purposefully outsourced the shitty, low-paying, dirty jobs in manufacturing overseas, such that our companies can make more money and we can reinvest in components of these companies, marketing, intellectual property, distribution, sales, retailing, research, such that we can grow better jobs. Now, have we done a good job?

of retraining the people left behind by the disruption of these industries? No. But the notion that we're gonna bring back iPhone manufacturing to the US, it would cost $3,500 to build an iPhone in the US. That would take their share down by 60 or 70 points, meaning the most held stock in the world would probably decline 60, 70, 80%. We are not bringing these jobs back, folks. Stop it.

In addition, because of these ridiculous tariffs, because we decided to declare war, on these fantastic allies that we've been trading with and getting the better end of the deal. When we sell Nvidia chips to Germany, we make 90 points of gross margin. When they sell a Mercedes into us, they get five points.

Global trade is like the biggest increase, you know, the biggest, the most accretive thing in wealth that we could have done was to trade with our global partners. What happens? They decide, okay, we can no longer trust these people, we can no longer trade with them, and they are trading— they are rerouting their supply chains around the U.S., and we're just going to have less business.

Back to universities. I apologize for being all over the place. When Trump says, I'm cutting your funding because of anti-Semitism, it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. He is trying to control or implement thought leadership and also emasculate universities, because the more critical thinking people do, the less they will embrace a Trump agenda.

So this ridiculous notion this has anything to do with anti-Semitism, Columbia tried to comply with some of this. They said, we have a problem. We'll do the following things. And then they started saying, we want to pick your faculty. We want to pick the curriculum. So there's real issues. The nation of Qatar has invested $4 billion in universities of our 14, and it's a fair question.

What are they asking for? What do they want in exchange for that? So these protests where people on campuses were supporting a genocidal death cult, that just didn't accidentally happen. and it needs to be addressed. But the notion that the Trump administration gives a shit about anti-Semitism on campus is just ridiculous.

So let's have an honest conversation about it, but let's not pretend that them cutting off research for diabetes or vaccines or LED panels or GPS or all.

If you know anyone in your life that has diabetes, if you have anyone in your life that was on an HIV cocktail, if you have anyone in your life that had a C-section, if you have anyone in your life who gets nuclear power, all of these technologies were developed at universities.

And the fact that we're turning away the best and brightest, the fact that we are emasculating the greatest investment in history, which is investing through our great universities who make these forward-leaning investments that the private sector wouldn't make, that's just stupid. And to do it under the banner of anti-Semitism is just totally disingenuous. Anyways, thank you for my TED Talk.

Nice.

Again, a lot there. So I think it's impossible not to empathize with people who have empathy for the fact that Gaza now has the greatest concentration of child amputees in the world. This is just horrific. I mean, it's horrific. Supposedly, one in five are in danger of actual starvation. I think Netanyahu, I'm like you, has been terrible for Israel, trying to disassemble the Supreme Court.

If you really look at the records, Netanyahu was supportive of Hamas because he felt if Hamas stayed in power, they'd be less likely to get a two-state solution. His kind of deal with the Israeli electorate was, I am not as democratic, you may not like me, but I'll keep you safe. I've been to Kibbutz Farazah. I went to the Gaza envelope, and all I could think was, all I had was rage.

I'm like, how on earth were Israeli and IDF gunships, helicopter gunships, not on the scene? He didn't keep them safe. He is not a democratic, he's not someone who upholds ideals of democracy over settlements, I am totally empathetic to the notion that Netanyahu has been terrible for Israel.

Now, as it relates to the war, this is a difficult thing to say, but I think one of the problems that plagues the Middle East is there's never a winner. And also with Israel, I think there's a double standard. They're allowed to defend themselves. People are comfortable and like a dead Jew, who then the army rises up and fights back to a truce.

But Israel is not allowed to prosecute the war the same way we've been allowed to prosecute wars. So 2,200 servicemen are killed at Pearl Harbor. We go on to kill 3.5 million Japanese, including 100,000 in one night. 2,800 people die in 9-11. We go on to kill about, I don't know, I think about 400,000 or 500,000 Iraqis in Afghanistan in Iraq.

And by the way, the ratio of enemy combatants to civilians was much higher, is much higher in Israel than it was in Germany, than it was in Mosul, than it was in Tokyo. So they are prosecuting a war, I don't want to say more humanely, but less inhumanely, than we did. And the analogy I would use is the following. What would we do if the following happened?

If a jihadist death cult was elected to the leadership of Mexico, and they said, you know, those Southern Baptists in Texas, they demonize us, they round us up, they separate our families, these are horrible people, and they train young people to just hate Americans, to think that they were the devil.

And they spent all of the foreign aid they were getting on tunnels and rockets, and then on one day, they incurred into Texas, and they killed on a per capita basis the entire population of the University of Texas faculty, students, and all the nursery schools and high schools. They killed, they slaughtered everybody.

And on the way back, retreating to Mexico, they took the freshman class of SMU hostage and held them underground in tunnels in Monterey. What do you think we would do to Mexico? It would be the great radioactive Sonoran parking lot. We have done much worse in terms of responding. So while I am incredibly empathetic to what is going on here, I think a bad peace is worse than any.

There's no such thing as a good war. But I think the problem here My attitude is I put the death of innocent civilians and children in Gaza at the feet of Hamas. The moment they lay down their weapons and surrender, I think the people of Gaza are better off. It's not like Israel is going to come in and start putting these people in camps and committing genocide.

That's my favorite one is when I see these students claiming that it's a genocide. Israel has heavy weaponry and nuclear weapons. If they wanted to commit genocide, against the people of Gaza. They could do it in about two weeks. Hamas would commit genocide against Jews, but can't. So I'm of the mind of, quite frankly, as horrific as it is, I am not a peace person here.

I think there needs to be a winner. And I am—and this is a horrible thing to say, but I think a bad peace is worse than a bad war, and every war is a bad war. So I think there's a double standard in terms of how Americans have responded to this type of aggression and how Israel is allowed to respond. But I just think it's impossible not to empathize with your empathy. I get it.

The question is, what do we do? What do we do? And Hamas is still holding hostages. underground, and our president is kissing the ass of Qatar, who has been their primarily funder and political, you know, mouthpiece. So I am very uncomfortable with this current administration, who got a lot of votes from the Jewish community because they thought it'd be good for Israel. That is ridiculous.

But I understand your pain and your empathy, but I'm on the side of saying we have a double standard for Israel, and I just ask people, what do you think we would do? Look what we have done.

But I just want to respond. There's two separate points there. The war in Israel, and so... The way I find or attempt to find moral clarity in war where there is no moral clarity is I try to imagine what would happen if they were in charge. If Israel had all of a sudden had charge of our government and our military, what would they do in America?

I think the next day you'd have civil rights, elections, jury trials, no cruel and unusual punishment, treatment of equal rights for women. What would Hamas do if they got control of the US government and our military? And this is gonna sound harsh, but I'll say it. At the end of World War II, we bombed Hamburg. They had lost all air defenses.

We killed 44,000 people in a small number of nights, only 400 service people. And they asked Truman and his generals, why do you keep bombing these cities when they're defenseless? And he said, they need to know they lost. And I have some sympathy to that.

Because until there's a winner here, and no one says, I don't understand, this is all over, when a death cult lays down their weapons and releases the hostages. So in my opinion, one of the problems of the Middle East is there's never a winner.

And all that's going to happen here, in my view, as long as Hamas is there, is they will continue to raise a generation of people who believe that Jews should be exterminated. And this will happen over and over and over. And there is no good war. It'll involve death of civilians. I am not someone seeking truce here. I think there needs to be a winner.

And I put all of these deaths at the feet of what is a genocidal death cult.

Okay, again, a lot there. 30% of Iranians support the Islamic Republic, so I'm more sympathetic to your arguments about Iran versus Gaza, where 70% of the populace endorses the leadership there.

I agree with you. I don't think we're in a position to wave our finger at anyone right now around... especially women's rights, when a 14-year-old can be raped and has to carry the baby to term in certain parts of America now. I think that is outrageous.

Having said that, while I've never wanted to defend MAGA, I do think it's a bit of a stretch and a false equivalence to compare the MAGA movement in any way to Hamas, who throws gay people off of roofs, believes in child marriage, says women can be executed if they don't comply. I mean, that's a different level.

Do you really think you can equate that in any way to the way Hamas equates themselves?

I'm with you. I'm really freaked out about the lack that we're the for the first time in America's history, we've taken away rights that had never happened before. It was always granting rights. And I would argue that the the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the thing I really don't like about it the most. Well, there's a lot I don't like about one of the things I don't like about it.

is regardless of what happens to family planning or laws in the United States, anyone who becomes pregnant in my life, I'll have access to family planning because I'm rich. I don't even see this. The most mendacious thing about this, in my view, is not that it's a war on women. I think it's a war on poor women.

I could live in deepest, reddest Mississippi, and if someone in my life has an unwanted pregnancy, No problem.

I can get mesofestrone overnight. I have the money and the contacts. Totally. But a 14-year-old black girl who's raped is embarrassed, unsophisticated, doesn't have a lot of education. Mom is working her ass off. Nobody knows she's pregnant until the fifth month. She can't fly to Atlanta. She has to carry that baby to term. So this isn't a war on women, it's a war on poor women.

And this brings up a larger point, and that is what is happening in America is the following, in my view. We're developing a cohort of what I call the transnational oligarch. And that is the top 1.1% have a disproportionate amount of power. The top 10 donors in America give more money than 80% of all donors combined.

And as a result, they're able to implement a series of tax cuts that create deficits. And the really sad part about it is that I'm in the 0.1% and I'm a hardcore Democrat. And what I see amongst my friends is a lot of pearl clutching and no willingness to actually speak out or really do anything that involves risk or sacrifice because of the following.

When you're in the 0.1%, you have your own rights. Anyone comes for me, Steve Bannon said the Trump administration should sue me, I can lawyer up like no tomorrow.

anyone in my life gets pregnant and said that about you yeah i wear it as a badge of honor you totally i have my i have access to my own education i have access to my own transportation i've got i can essentially sequester from the real america with my money so the threat to american democracy is not as great for the most powerful people because at the end of the day if they start rounding up jews again i'm jewish

as they did in Germany, as they are rounding up people with the wrong tattoo. Like, no one I know has been rounded up, because they're poor, right? I doubt very many of us know someone who's actually been rounded up. And that's what's happening here when you send people to black sites in other nations and other states. Because the most powerful among us, even on the Democratic side,

have developed their own set of rights. Your rights are a function of how much money you have. The top 0.1% are protected by the law, but we're not bound by it, whereas the bottom 99.9% are not protected by the law, but they're bound by it. Democracy has become a function of how much money you have. And if shit ever really gets real in the US, I have the money,

to peace out to Milan or Dubai and be just fine. And the problem with this is the most powerful people in the United States, even the one who hold dear democratic values, don't really feel a sense of threat, don't really feel like they need to take risks and speak out because they have their own democracy called wealth.

Well, I know a lot of these CEOs. I think I tallied it up, and this is bragging, but I think I've worked with 30 of the CMOs or CEOs of the 100 biggest companies in the world. And I think 90% of them wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and say, hello, Mr. or Madam President. I think they all think of themselves as, they are extraordinary leaders.

I think most of them think that at some point, there'll be this overwhelming draft to get them to run for president. But here's the thing. The primary qualification to be president is leadership. And leadership, simply put, is doing the right thing even when it's really hard.

And right now, I'm going to list the number of CEOs who are willing to speak out and say what everyone's saying privately and realize that a lot of the American values that gave them exceptional wealth and opportunities they recognize are under attack right now. So here's the list. Okay, I'm done. There has been such a domino of cowardice in corporate America.

Because the short-term incentives are to say, just stay out of his way. Just ignore him. Put out a press release saying you're investing more money. Send a million dollars to his inauguration committee. Buy his wife's lame documentary for $40 million when no one would pay 40 bucks for it. Just stay out of his way.

He's got the attention of a cat chasing a red dot, and we move on, and it's the best thing for shareholder value. At some point, someone is gonna speak up.

The biggest commercial opportunity I've seen in a while is for a great American company, Nike, through the lens of commercials and athletes, to talk about, without mentioning Trump's name, how important our immigrants are in America, to talk about how important our freedoms are, and how we have always erred on the side of giving people due process.

in just how incredibly powerful America has become because of its due process, its rule of law, and its willingness to embrace immigrants and err on the side of generosity and being a loving, generous people to people who are less fortunate. And they could do this so powerfully, and this is what would happen. The reality is, I look at stuff economically.

The people who that commercial would enrage are driving RAF4s and have trucker hats and have almost no disposable income. And that's an elitist statement and it's true. And the people who would be emboldened and feel really good about that company are the people with all the money.

Because the people who, if you look at the disposable income of the people who are really horrified by Trump's activities, I bet it's 70 or 80% of the consumer market. So for example, when Nike embraced Colin Kaepernick and you saw these YouTube videos of people burning their Nikes, I bet that was the first pair of Nikes they ever owned.

Because the majority of Nike's market is people under the age of 30, it's a lot of non-whites, these are progressives. So the biggest commercial opportunity is for a guy like Doug McMillan, or Elliot Hill from Walmart or Tim Cook from Apple to say, look, this may cost us in the short term, but we and I are the enormous beneficiaries of American values.

And what we see here going on does not support American values. He would go apeshit. And every Democrat with money would go buy another iPhone, another pair of Nike tennis shoes, or say—you know, Walmart would be a tougher one, because they have a lot of consumers that are probably Trumpers.

But there's an aspirational brand that is going to step into this void, and they're going to get a torrent, a waterfall of new business. And in the short term, Trump will come after them, and he'll get angry, and he'll have his attorney general threaten lawsuits. And then they'll go on to their next big fucking disaster or building they want to build in the Middle East.

I think this is the biggest commercial opportunity presented to a big American brand in a long time.

I haven't seen any research that shows that there's a difference in entrepreneurship or management capability based on political party. What I have seen, though, is that 70 or 80% of the nation's GDP derives from deep, deep blue counties. specifically the ones that have technology or big companies or urban areas.

And just as an analogy, for example, California sends $80 billion of excess tax revenue to the federal government, more than it takes. It's surplus. It's a payer. It's a net giver. Whereas Texas is a net taker. They get $70 billion in benefits. And the Republican Party's genius is an ability to get people to vote against their own interests.

Because if you look at the cuts they're proposing in this tax bill, which will be the largest transfer of wealth in history from the poor to the rich or from the young to the old, depending on how you want to categorize it, it's really going to disproportionately hurt red states who are very, you know, 40% of children now are on Medicaid.

And those homes that need Medicaid for their kids' chronic illness are disproportionately over indexed in very red counties. So I'm not a huge fan of Senator Warren's policies, but I do think she's a leader, and I'd like some of her narrative. But she kind of summarized it perfectly. She said, look, they're getting richer while you're losing your health care.

And not only that, I, again, try to look at this stuff through an economic lens. cutting Medicaid, cutting SNAP payments. SNAP shows a return of 3% to 7% a year, meaning it actually returns. It's like buying a treasury bill. You get money back because these kids have better health outcomes.

They're less likely to develop childhood obesity, diabetes, end up needing dialysis, hip replacements, more likely to end up not being hungry such that they can study, end up not being incarcerated. It's been shown that every dollar we get for SNAP we get money back. These programs actually yield a benefit. We're cutting DOGE, which supposedly cut $150 billion.

We're actually going to lose $250 billion a year, because part of the cuts are eviscerating 40% of the IRS, which will cost us $400 billion a year. So we're going to lose a quarter of a trillion dollars a year in tax.

revenue with the doge cuts and by the way who really benefits from that very wealthy people have complicated tax returns it's easy to audit someone from a lower middle class home who's not going to get audited are the very wealthy households and i can tell you firsthand that the general gestalt among the very wealthy right now is be so aggressive because it's unlikely you'll get audited because your tax return is so complicated that it takes real resources and the irs

is massively underutilized. I think almost everything we do here legislatively has been an elegant transfer of wealth from the young to the old, from the poor to the rich, because the old, quite frankly, have figured out a way, and I know this sounds ageist, I am an ageist, is they figured out a way to vote themselves more money. And think of it this way.

Congress has become a cross between the Golden Girls and the land of the walking dead. That's bad.

What's worse about it is that 75% of them will be dead within 30 years. So are they really that concerned with climate change? Are they really that worried about the deficits? Because when you're 70 years old, the future is a relative term. So what we have is too much short-term thinking, and also, since George W. Bush, we've decided that we can have our cake and eat it too.

We had a fiscal surplus through Clinton Al Gore's proposed budget was going to give us $5 trillion in surplus. George Bush decided to give it all back to the taxpayers, and he decided to do something we'd never done in history. We can go to war, and we can cut taxes. Before that, when we went to war,

We raised taxes because we wanted to say to American consumers, it not only is costing us blood, it's costing us treasure. But when George Bush decided to cut taxes and go to war, it started a downward spiral of deficits or the acceptance or tolerance of deficits that, by the way, both Republicans and Democrats have continued. Biden had $5 trillion in deficits. Trump had eight.

So George Washington to George Bush, we had seven trillion in deficits, and one term under Trump, we had eight trillion. And speaking to him about a business, what I do agree with you on, there's a myth that Trump is a good business person.

If he had taken the money inherited from his father and just put it in an index fund, he would have been wealthier until he pulled off this masterful grift of the Trump coin where he has increased his wealth a billion dollars a month since being elected. He has left a trail of bankrupt companies and unpaid subcontractors in his wake. He is not a good business person. That I will sign up for.

He is a fantastic reality TV show host. He is an amazing grifter. I think the Trump coin is such an elegant grift. The bad news is we have a mob family running the country right now. The worst news is that Michael Corleone is running the crime and Fredo is running the government. I wish they brought some of the same competence they're bringing to their grift.

They are elegant, disciplined, organized around the grift. And then you have these village idiots running our defense department. Totally. Conspiracy theorists running HHS. Yeah. It's like bring in the criminals that you have on your grift to run the government because at least they're competent.

Oh, absolutely had it. Abso-fucking-lutely had it. You know what the second worst thing to happen to young people? What? The worst thing is remote work. The second worst thing is the anti-alcohol movement. The risk to your 25-year-old liver is dwarfed by the risk of social isolation.

Let me ask both of you, what role has alcohol played in the formation of your romantic and your platonic relationships as young women?

Okay, started drinking at 19, lost my virginity at 19, do the math.

Okay, I have never, look, my advice to young people, and I say this only half jokingly, is that you get out of the house more, drink more, and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off.

So I used to leave my mom's house at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning with an Abba Zabba bar, a Schwinn bike, and 35 cents, and she wouldn't see me for 14 hours. My kid is 15 minutes late home from school. We call fucking MI6, and we freak out. And here's the problem. We use so many sanitary wipes on our kids' lives, they don't develop their own immunities.

We engage in bulldozer and concierge parenting. We clear out all the obstacles for them. And this is what happens, and I know this firsthand, at NYU. They get to NYU, they get their first D, they get their heart broken, and they freak out. And I'm guilty of this, but what I'm trying to do, and I'll use a personal example, and I love personal examples that make me seem like the good guy.

But my kid, I'm just absent-minded. I'm terrible. I'm alone with my son, his 14-year-old. Of course, they love malls. He's going to a party at the Westfield Mall. I get him an Uber. He goes to the Westfield Mall. My phone starts blowing up. He's at the wrong Westfield Mall. It ends up there are two Westfield Malls in London, and he's at the wrong one. His mom is furious at me. He's freaked out.

And finally, I get them both on the phone, and I say, Nolan? Figure it the fuck out. You have a smartphone, you have Google Maps, you have an Oyster card, you have an Uber app, figure it out. I don't even know why I ordered an Uber for you. I don't know why I am figuring out at the age of 14. Nobody told me where to go or got me Google Maps or an Uber when I was 14. And you know what?

He figured it out. We need to let our kids fail. And this is really hard for me. Occasionally I see my kids making a mistake and I'm like,

all right it's like mel robbins let them because these kids have to figure out my kid was just out for this really big award he worked so hard for it he just missed out on it we were all sort of heartbroken and i said to his mom i'm like this is kind of the best thing that can happen to these kids my uh of course i always like to bring this back to me my superpower

is the ability to endure rejection. I ran for ninth, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade presidents, lost all four races, and based on my track record, I decided to run for student body president where I went on to get this, lose. I interviewed at 19 jobs, I barely got one. I applied to nine graduate schools, I got into two. I can't tell you how many VCs I've tried to raise money from that have said no.

It would be impossible for me to in any way categorize or shape the enormity of rejection I've endured from women. And the reason why I am economically secure and get to hang out and have sex with someone much hotter than me is because I am not afraid of rejection.

And the worst thing that is happening to our young men in this society is that the deepest-pocketed, most talented organizations in the world all want to give them a low-friction version of life that says, rather than going out and trying to make friends, trying to find a job,

trying to find a mate, go on Reddit or Discord or porn or Coinbase or Robinhood, and they are not developing the skills or the calluses for no. The most important way to success is a shit ton of nos.

The only thing successful people have in common, it's not where they went to school or it's no longer their gender, it's no longer even, thank God, their skin color, it's that they are not afraid of no. If you want to get to really wonderful yeses professionally, personally, romantic, sexually, get ready for fucking no over and over and over. And not enough young people are being exposed to no.

And all that means is they're never going to get to wonderful yeses.

Oh, had it. It's one of the reasons the Democratic Party is less popular than an insurrectionist. Do you realize if the election happened today, Trump would still win? The Democratic Party has a lower rating, approval rating than Trump. Yeah. And, you know, look at our leadership.

Chuck Schumer, who brightens up a room by leaving it, and his way he's fighting back is to send a strongly worded letter. That's how we're responding, with a strongly worded letter. So, and I think identity politics have absolutely submarine the Democratic Party. I went to the Democratic National Committee, our convention. It was a parade of special interest groups.

talking about the very real struggles they all face, but they look at everything through the lens of identity. And by the way, the one group they didn't mention was the group that has fallen furthest fastest, and that is young men who are four times as likely to kill themselves, three times as likely to be addicted, 12 times as likely to be incarcerated. But we don't want to talk about young men

because of the privilege, the unearned privilege men my age received and were holding young men responsible for it. If you go to the Democratic website, dnc.org, there's a portion of the site that says who we serve, and it lists 16 demographic groups ranging from Asian Pacific Islanders to black Americans to disabled to veterans. I added it up, it's 74% of the US population.

When a political party says explicitly we are openly, overtly advocating for 74% of the population, you're not. you're not advocating for 74%, you're discriminating against the 26%, and it's young men, and this is why Trump won. If you look at the three groups that pivoted hardest from blue to red, from Biden to Trump, or from Biden to Harris, from 2020 to 24, it's three groups.

Hispanics or Latinos, who don't wanna be categorized as a group, they can't be categorized as a group. Mexicans in Southern California are much different than Cuban Americans in Southern Florida. Number two was people under the age of 40. For the first time in the history of America, a 30-year-old isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at 30.

That has never happened in our 275-year history. It's a breakdown in the social compact. They went to Trump. All they want is chaos. And then the interesting part, and I'd be curious what you guys think of it, is 45- to 64-year-old women, in my thesis, is that's their mothers.

Because if your son is in the basement playing video games and vaping, you don't give a shit about territorial sovereignty in Ukraine or transgender rights. You just know your son isn't doing well. And women don't like to hear this, but the bottom line is there are still a lot of women in America that will vote for what they perceive is best for their husbands and their sons.

And so all you want is chaos. My son isn't doing well. I want change. And the incumbent, Vice President Harris, was not perceived as change. So our inability to focus on who really needs help, regardless of their identity, which is the middle class in America and young people, That has gotten in the way of Democrats' ability to win elections.

We are now seen as the party that's more interested in grabbing social virtue than figuring out actual programs that increase the material and psychological well-being of citizens. Identity politics has fucked us.

But we stuck our chin out, and we warranted an overreaction, or not warranted, but we invited an overreaction. When you're letting trans women compete in women's sports, where there's scholarships or money on the line, you're just setting yourself up for an overreaction. In addition, and this is a victory, but we need to acknowledge the data. In America today,

You'd rather be born non-white or gay than poor. The academic achievement gap between black and white was double what it was between rich and poor 60 years ago. Now it's flipped. This all kind of comes down to the question that I think most people, most Republicans and almost all Democrats believe that there are certain people born with wind in their face that deserve a hand up.

The question is, what is the metric for deciding who gets a hand up? And I believe it shouldn't be based on any physical attribute. I think it should be based on one thing. and that is the primary dictator of how hard your life is gonna be, and that's how much money you have.

I believe in affirmative action, and I believe it should be based in color, but it should be based on green, and that is how much money you have. Show me the Taiwanese daughter of a private equity billionaire, I'm gonna show you someone who gets into an elite university.

Show me a white kid from Appalachia who was raised by a single mother whose father's incarcerated, I'm gonna have to show you a kid that has a life of addiction and abuse in his life. Affirmative action is a wonderful thing. I'm the beneficiary. I'm a white, heterosexual male. I got unfair advantage. My mother was a secretary, so I got something called Pell Grants.

I got free money, which gave me unfair advantage, and it started an upward spiral for me where I'm now a huge taxpayer. Affirmative action is a wonderful thing, but it should be based on money. We should be helping. Our focus should be on the poor and, quite frankly, people under the age of 40 who have fallen behind relative to their parents. But any observable

your sexual orientation, your race, quite frankly, I think it leads to more problems than it solves. And here's where we can come together. An affirmative action-based program based on income has a 70% overlap with non-whites and the people who traditionally were advantaged because there still is an economic apartheid in the United States.

Black and Hispanic families have an average net worth of about 20 or 25 grand, white families 150. But when you normalize it for college, It evens out. So Trevor, I was just on Trevor Noah's podcast. His kids have too much advantage in today's America. He's they're rich. They're getting the tutors.

They live in areas where I don't think they face any real discrimination, but they still get advantage getting into schools. That's unfair. It should be based on how much money you have. Low income households are the ones that need lifting up and young people need lifting up because we have consistently taken money from them.

and giving it to the wealthiest generation in the world, and that is old people. So affirmative action is a wonderful thing. It should be based on income and nothing else.

Yeah, 100%.

Well, as long as you'll be my sisters in arms, as long as you guys join me.

I appreciate you having me and congrats on all your success.

When I was growing up, it was a lot simpler.

But we know it doesn't have to be like this. We can do better for our young men. I failed. Scott has failed. All those people you're looking up to have failed. And you got to just stay in the game. Join me and my good friend, Professor Scott Galloway, for this limited edition podcast, Lost Boys, where we talk about the unique challenges young men face today and what we can do about it.

But today, between the morass of social media and the confusion about pronoun usage and the whole change in the culture, it's a lot harder for young men to thrive.