The Single Biggest Point of Failure In A Man's Life | Scott Galloway X Rich Roll Podcast

We are raising a generation of men who are going to be increasingly psychotic and crazy. That was ugly. It's like yeah, it's so depressing. What does healthy masculinity look like? Masculinity is an amazing thing, you shouldn't apologize for it, you should lean into it. But what does it mean that we have combined toxicity with masculinity? There are so many lonely young people who have no interaction with people who are very susceptible to anything or algorithm that gives them a sense of self-worth. I would have been one of those guys today. angry and upset, so I say that my guest today is Scott Galloway Scott is a professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business, he is a best-selling author, he is also the host of the Prof G

podcast

and co-host of the pivot

podcast

with Caris Swisher. social construct and many women demonstrate wonderful masculinity, it is not the domain of people born as men in urban areas, now in the US, women under 30 make more money than men and by the way, that is wonderful, we shouldn't have to do anything to get it.

In that sense, I think women are ready for more financially and emotionally responsible young men, so the question is how do we level up young men? Today's episode is brought to you by the incredible organization that makes this show possible, Scott, thank you for doing this. I know it is a difficult task to come here. I appreciate you taking the time. I have been waiting for this for a long time and there is a lot to talk about. You are such an interesting figure. You are at the intersection of business and entrepreneurship. Tip: You're kind of a really smart cultural critic expert on technology, higher education reform, and also self-help.

You have this really astute facility for counseling that is aimed broadly, but also very specifically, at this particular lens on young men and this concern. you have for the next generation and I think the sentiment behind this is really that we have a demonstrable problem with men in the next generation the culture of men the evolution of men the growth of men who they are, where and how they are being guided or not guided and how they are distracted or diverted in a way that really interferes with their growth and their potential and, in turn, the growth of a healthy society.

Yeah, first of all, thanks for the kind words, I think. I said when I came in we went through all the podcast invites we have and I just mentioned your name and before I even finished it like half my staff had gone crazy, you resonate deeply with a lot of people. I appreciate that yeah look this is something I'm passionate about I think the data is overwhelming you know three times more likely to be addicted four times more likely to commit suicide than women uh 12 times more likely to be incarcerated 70% of opioids all the days you know we don't have a homeless problem, we don't have an opioid problem, we don't have an incarceration problem, we have a male suicide, a homeless and incarceration problem and if any other special interest group committed suicide at a rate four times higher than the control group we would talk about In different terms, we would talk about the need for social program intervention, empathy, but when something like this happens to young men there is a lack of empathy, words are heard as a responsibility or if they were just more in touch with their emotions and I think that's really gotten in the way of a productive conversation and because there hasn't been a productive conversation and people feel and see what's happening, some voices They have entered that void that are unproductive voices and sometimes that type of rhetoric is often promoted. it's suddenly a veiled misogyny or a lack of empathy or something like what I'll call the manosphere starts out good, it's action-oriented, it's in shape, it takes control, but then it goes to really strange places, it treats women like property or talk about immigrants taking over your job or just en

roll

in my crypto University, it just goes to strange places, it has also been a third rail issue to raise the danger of the wayward youth in a world where the conversation turns to about elevating certain sectors of culture and Society is about women and people of color and yet the quote I've heard you repeat often is that the most dangerous person in the world is a broken and alone man, if you look Globally, the most unstable violent societies in the world.

One thing in common: they have a disproportionate number of young people with a lack of economic or romantic prospects. What do we do? We send them to war. If they have no internal economic prospects, they will overthrow the government. Then we encounter conflict and We send them to war and also this younger generation of men is paying for the unfair advantage that you and I had growing up. I was born in Los Angeles or Southern California in 1964. I won the lottery. You know, being born a straight man had a big advantage. I was also born in California in '66, you went to UCLA, I went to Stanford, I am the beneficiary of an incredible, private education, and now that you know, access to what you and I had access to is all more remote these days, what's going on, how did we get to this place, what are the tectonic plates that have gotten us to this situation that we're in, so just to make the

point

about accessibility, I don't know the numbers at Stanford, but when I presented my application to UCLA in 1982 the acceptance rate was 76% and it was $1,200 a year and I had to apply twice and I got the acceptance rate this year will be 9% and it's $34,000 so it's inaccessible to anyone who is Not notable, notable or

rich

, so how do we get here?

I think there have been a variety of things. Confluence of factors that have collided around young men. One simply has a lack of empathy. People see it as zero. A game in which you do feel empathy for. men, it must mean they are anti-women, so there is a lack of empathy and what I call zero, some games, you know, civil rights didn't hurt white people, it helped them, gay marriage doesn't hurt marriage heteronormative, improvement. So talking about empathy for young men is in no way and should in no way be seen as anti-women. I think the group that wants more viable young men, uh, first and foremost, mothers, are the ones I hear the most that see what's going on.

I continue with their daughters and the difference between their daughters and their sons and also the women. I think women are ready for more economically and emotionally viable young men. Women are dating older and older because they have trouble finding what they would perceive as viable young men. So a few things: one, just, biiCal men's prefrontal cortex matures later, they just don't have the same executive function or the same adult in the room, they're less mature, literally, less mature. Two, we have an education system that is biased against them, if you talk about it. about reward related behaviors in school, you're basically going to describe a girl, be organized, be accommodating, sit still, you also have an educational industrial complex, 92% of kindergarten teachers are women, there are more females per capita F pilots in kindergarten, male kindergarten teachers, it's about 70 80% from kindergarten to 6th grade and about 60 70% in high school and naturally you're going to empathize with a little version of you, so I don't think there's the same level of empathy for young men that we've had as well.

The metal shop, the auto shop, the carpentry shop are gone, so the guy who isn't cut out for college, who doesn't sit still, and who isn't academically focused has fewer and fewer avenues of entry to college. a middle-class

life

style and then these guys enter the workforce, there are fewer middle-class business jobs in America Parents have done a very good job of convincing themselves that they have failed as parents if their children don't They end up at Stanford or UCLA, so there's a lot of anger and shame at home, no visible on-ramps. to a healthy middle-class

life

3% of LinkedIn profiles In the United States say Apprentice It is 11% in the United Kingdom and Germany 50% of Germans have some type of vocational certification that is not true.

Year it became this, or you get to Stanford or UCLA or you and your parents have failed and then a lot of dating apps Dynamics where you have two 3 to one, men to women, and you also have this effect where, because because everyone has access to everyone, not everyone, but the women who have a much finer filter are all of them. attracted to the type of what I call the same guy, so you have 50 men on offer, 50 women, 46 of those women will show all their attention and interest to just four guys, so it's great to be in the top 10% in a dating app if you're a late 90's guy, it's really hard and the bottom half of men on dating apps now were one and two relationships starting to get validation that they have absolutely no value in the dating market. dating, so the lack of economic prospects and the lack of maturity society that doesn't seem to have much empathy for them and then a mating market that validates that they don't have much value and you see these men fall into this downward spiral where they start and this is where you know we've really lost them, they start to become ultra-nationalist, they start to blame immigrants, they start to blame women, they become prone to conspiracy theory, in some they just become really shitty citizens and The last thing I would say is that the most profitable valuable companies in the world.

They have one thing in common and that is that they are taking advantage of the lack of regulation and instinctive

failure

s. Men are more risk aggressive, so the fastest growing tech sector right now is gaming, which is a polite way of saying that gamers are more risk aggressive than they like. bet 85% of gamblers are men, they are four to six times more likely to develop a gambling addiction, then you put it on a phone and Kevin Hart and Charles Barkley tell you that you're smart, that you should bet on March Madness and then you have social media apps or Robin Hood or meta or YouTube that tap into these instincts, these flawed instincts of men where they become conspiracy theory prone, much riskier, aggressive, much more inclined to develop a relationship with uPorn Instead of saying okay, how do I go out and develop the skills, play, and financial and emotional viability to find my own romantic partner?

They are confusing Reddit and Discord with friendship. They are confusing Robin Hood and Coinbase with making a living. confusing porn with getting into a relationship, and so many of these men have had the real world or reason to find real relationships replaced with algorithms and screens, it's a low, low-risk cost of entry to having a reasonable life. and, if you're not careful you wake up a few years later you don't have those skills and you're depressed because go out and find a job go out go to work get up put on a tie learn to read the room learn how to make a woman laugh establish body language be persistent endure rejection you know there's a reason romantic comedies are two hours long and not 15 minutes this is difficult and humiliating but this is what true victory looks like in real life and I think there is a disproportionate or small number of young men men who are ever going to experience that true joy and that true Victory because of the low cost, low entry, reasonable life-like fact that these companies take advantage of, that's a pretty terrible portrait of the current state of things , the eradication of opportunities, the lack of adequate resources.

The access ramps to higher education and, you know, the confluence of all these technologies that conspire to capture the attention of the young person and channel it in unhealthy ways will leave that individual not only depressed but angry and looking for a way out of their life. that anger, well there is an advantage if you are in the top 10%, life has never been better, we are in a Hunger Games economy, victory leads an extraordinary life and everyone else dies a slow death if you are united when you were young and have the discipline to get the right certification the graduates of my class at Stern I give the MBA their average salary is $212,000 they go on a dating app they are going to get a lot of attention their opportunities have never been more exceptional their vacations their ability to care for your parents at a young age your economic opportunity your opportunity to earn millions is within reach when we turn 30 those opportunities didn't exist for our parents so you have become something of a winner, you take most of the environment, so it's great to be in the top 10%, but I can prove to all of us that 90% ofour kids are not in the top 10% and when you think about it, it comes to mind what America is supposed to be like and the reason I got involved here was in that bottom 90 probably was in that bottom 50 is America about identifying the notable or identifying the children of the

rich

and turning them into billionaires is that what America is supposed to do my opinion is that America is about identifying or Giving everyone in the bottom 90% has the opportunity to be in the top 10%.

That's how it was when I grew up. It didn't have anything special. I think when I look at you I see someone. I mean, you're clearly passionate about this. It's a very mission-oriented and service-oriented type of endeavor that you're in and you're someone who has had a lot of success in different areas of life. You have financial independence. You could choose to do many different things and you have chosen through So far, you appear publicly on Prof G's media and podcasting etc. to really focus your advocacy around this and it seems very serious and sincere to me, it really is a mission that you are passionate about.

Don't know. What about you rich, but I was that guy? You know, I didn't have much money, no, no romantic prospects, but I need a minute. America loved me, of course, free education, notable institution, great job. opportunity for you know to have a financially viable opportunity to take care of my mother like I was one of those guys today angry and upset, so I can relate, yeah , your mother was an integral figure in all of this, yes, look at the reason I'm here with Now it's easy to credit your courage and your character for your success and blame the market for your

failure

s.

I can come here and bolt out of here and go to the Bly Hills Hotel and do whatever you know. I want to, and you know, have an incredible life thanks to the generosity and vision of the taxpayers of California and the regeneration of the University of California, who said that our job is to give ordinary children an extraordinary opportunity to be born in the right place at the right time and the unconditional love of my mother true

single

mother immigrant lived and died secretary but you know every day she told me that I was wonderful and I think that stuck with me but yeah, I don't know what your relationship was like with your parents, but if you think about investing, there are some basics, right?

You invest a little money. Compound interest is simply something remarkable. Most people feel that the singular relationship in their life, if they are asked to identify the singular relationship in their life, they generally do so more often than not number one is their mother and it is because she made those small investments in you every day waking up with a soft voice worried because you could hear yourself get up when you were a kid and come in and comfort you every day just dozens of little investments and you know your mom wakes up and you wake up when you're older no matter if you don't get along , maybe they don't even like each other, but it's a unique relationship and you know, I think a lot about how powerful it was for me and how truly wonderful my mom was and she had the foresight to involve a lot of men in my life because if you look the only

point

of failure in a young man's life is when he loses a male role model and it's interesting because we have the second highest number of

single

parent households in the world behind Sweden and when we say single father 92% of the time that means it's a single mother and the interesting thing is that the data shows that daughters of single mothers have the same outcome the same college attendance the same income the same rates of self-harm children once they lose a male role model they immediately become dramatically more likely to be incarcerated dramatically less likely to graduate from high school dramatically more likely to suffer from addiction, which ends up being that while kids are physically stronger, they are much weaker emotionally and mentally just because you say it's so important for a child has a man involved in her life, that in no way diminishes superheroes who are single mothers, but I think we have to acknowledge it. that it is really important that men are involved and that is the problem with schools now that they don't have enough men because there is a whole generation of young people who go through their lives until they are 25 with absolutely no men involved and if you have children, see that every now and then dad plays a bigger role, his physical size, his voice, whatever it is, and I'm thinking a lot about masculinity.

I think the ultimate expression of masculinity is that I have my body, so together I can take care of myself. I can take care of my immediate family I can take care of my children the people I work with you know I pay good taxes but the ultimate expression of masculinity is to get involved in the life of a child that is not yours and unfortunately Michael Jackson. and the Catholic Church have it all for us and created this strange notion that if you are a boy your age and you are very successful, you might have love to give and you might see a 15 year old who could use your It helps and it feels unnatural to be involved in their life and that's not true, yes, the culture of mentoring has diminished, to say the least, and you know, I think it's fair to say that America was built on the idea of ​​learning and mentoring, but that culture seems to have evaporated, where are the mentors?

Where are the wise counsel and sound masculine men who are helping to guide the Next Generation? Well, I learned it from the coaches, but a lot of kids don't go to church even though they used to To get it from the reverend or rabbi, community-oriented programs have disappeared, what are the rates of young men in sports? Is it like it was when we were kids? There are fewer young men participating in sports and where are the other healthy outlets for young men? They need mentoring, so sports are like most things, there is still the same level of participation, but unfortunately it has targeted the rich.

Participating in a sport hasn't become a luxury item, but it's pretty close, even if you look at college athletes on the outside. of basketball, basketball and football are disproportionately wealthy kids because if your kid wants to play lacrosse, sending him to lacrosse camps or her to lacrosse camps and getting him the right training and the right equipment, it's just expensive, but I think you know that sports are and after. School programs are being cut, but going to Solutions, I think there are a lot of solutions, so kids who start a year late in elementary school are simply less mature.

The worst thing that happened to me or almost happened to me is that my parents wanted me to do it. skip a grade because you were back in the space race and if you were offered the opportunity to skip a grade, that meant you were going to work for NASA. I showed up at UCLA at the age of 17 and was too immature to handle it. The alcohol and the pressure of it all make him start a year later to try to create greater incentives to get more men in elementary and middle school and in elementary school.

More vocational programming. There are plenty of jobs in the real economy for the construction specialty. care anyone who is renovating a house knows that a roof makes very good money let alone a plumber and stop shaming those jobs, start elevating them. I think we have to improve young people in general. There has been a huge transfer of wealth from the young to the old. People, specifically people under 40, used to control 19% of the GDP in terms of their wealth. It has been reduced to 9%. The average 7-year-old is 72% richer than he was 40 years ago. The average minor person. 40 years old is 24% less wealthy and that affects women and men, but it disproportionately affects men because men are evaluated fairly or unfairly from a mating perspective based on their economic viability.

I think the best example of this represents the greatest innovation in history. It wasn't the iPhone or a semiconductor, it was the American middle class who thought that the rejected wars against fascism paid a huge amount of taxes. He was innovative, he came up with DARPA, he came up with vaccines, he came up with GPS and where it all started was 7 million men came back from World War II and demonstrated excellence in uniform and the government said we're going to make a massive investment. in them in terms of the GI bill in the highway construction bill, we will give them jobs, we will give them economic viability and Frankly, they were very attractive and they had an easier time finding a partner, finding a house with a two-car garage and That sparked the baby boom and sparked a generation of loving, trusting children who felt comfortable and said, "Okay, it's time to get civilized." It's time to get women into the workforce, it's time for women's rights and it just sparked this kind of post-World War II liberal progressive society, like we've never seen that kind of prosperity, but the middle class is a accident.

It is not self-sufficient for the rulers and people on the far right will claim that the middle class is a self-repairing organism. It is not an anomaly. The middle classes have never existed in society before we discovered it, but unless you have an economic problem. and emotionally viable men you can't have a middle class, so the question is how do we raise the bar for young men and I don't think you can just have affirmative action for men. I think that's too political, but I do think we have to do it. let's put more money in the pockets of the young people who have seen a transfer of wealth and I will play a third rail here every year we transfer a trillion and a half dollars the largest economic transfer in history occurs every year from the young to the richest generation in the story of seniors and it's called Social Security and it's crazy that this group that constantly sees their wealth and, based on inflation, their livelihoods decrease and decrease and they transfer money to the richest population in the world, so let's talk. more on economics the mortgage tax deduction and capital gains are the two largest deductions in our tax code who makes their money selling stocks and selling assets kids my age who make their money through sweat the kids in this room the kids older young people who own houses older people who rent to younger people I feel like almost all economic policies are nothing more than a thinly veiled TR transfer of wealth from the young to the old and then the latest, the

biggest

intergenerational train robbery in the world story was the Care Act and the transfer of wealth during covid. 85% of the money invested in households was saved, not spent, so five of the $7 trillion was not spent on food or housing, but instead went into markets, causing food prices to rise. real estate and stock market assets will shout who owns the houses. and stocks, the headlines and the old guys, the reason I'm rich is because in 2008 the government let the economy collapse, they bailed out the banks, but they didn't bail out the economy.

I had a little money. I was getting into my main income. earning years so I was able to buy Apple, Amazon and Netflix at seven, four and 10 dollars, yeah where did these guys put their money in Nvidia at $900 a share? What do they buy a house in Agura Hills, a nice ranch house for $2.3? million when they rescued me and the incumbents 3 years ago, all they were doing was stealing opportunities from young people. When you bail out the Boomer who owns a restaurant, all you're doing is stealing opportunities. The 26-year-old woman who graduated from Brookland Culinary Academy isn't getting her rotation and turnover is key to giving young people a chance, so what we effectively decided during Co that a million people would die would be bad, but letting the NASDAQ fall and making Boomer less rich would be tragic.

It was pure theft and who is going to have to pay for this, not you or me, them and their children, yeah, that doesn't bode well, you know? And then when you think about that in the context of the increasing polarization and the kind of denigration of our public discourse and the increasing distrust in institutions combined with the lack of opportunity and everything that you just described. Does America survive this? How are we going to return the GNA to a place where we provide adequate opportunities to young people? We are in a social contract with our brothers and sisters where we agree on the things that are important to create a healthy culture that can survive and flourish as a Democratic Republic.

Well, I mean ground zero, I think, for almost all of our problems or the One incendiary port for our problems is that, for the first time in the history of our nation, a 30-year-old man or woman is not doing as well as his parents when they were 30 years old, that had never happened before. What is so worrying is that it is on the face of unprecedented prosperity, five minutes after theNvidia earnings release adds $240 billion in market cap, but we can't afford the child tax credit. The $24-$40 billion child tax credit immediately eliminated poverty for 40% of children and food security. homes like I didn't even think you could do that with 2.44 billion we spend $800 billion on our military and I'm not suggesting we should reduce it.

I think it's important that we have a strong defense department, but what do you know? a 9% increase in the cost of living adjustment and the child tax credit is removed from the infrastructure bill, so we have elected representatives with an average age of 63 DC is a cross between The Walking Dead and The Golden Girls and if that sounds aist, it is aist, but here it is What do they really relate to a 28 year old who is trying to build a house with kids and the kids don't vote and the young people don't vote but the old people vote?

So we're about to see it for the first time in In the history of our nation, almost 50% of our federal budget is allocated to seniors and young people, as a result, they just don't have as many opportunities and they're not stupid, they bothers, they look up, they see us, they see the opportunities. we made them see how much money is spent on older people and then every day they are reminded that they are failing, that they live in a society where algorithms constantly tell them that everyone else is rich, you fail if you are not at the top.

Almond hotel or you don't fly private or you don't have abs or you don't have an attractive boyfriend or girlfriend, you failed and you get these reminders every day so I think these righteous movements around black lives matter and so do I, they're fair movements, but every movement now has a lot of inflammatory reports because young people are just angry, they're like, okay, my neighbor works at Google, she's killing it. I'm not in the top 1% and The thing is, we as Americans are our superpowers, our optimism, but we all believe that our child will be in that top 1% and I think we're moving away from America, which used to be about giving them ordinary children an extraordinary opportunity for us.

I've decided, okay, let's elect a bunch of people who continue to transfer wealth from young people and, oh wait, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropped out of college, that can happen, okay, but most young people if you look in the numbers are having a tough time, we have the most anxious depressed generation in history, the science is in the people, hot and cold therapy, in other words, using sauna and cold water immersion has so many powerful benefits like reducing inflammation, reduce muscle soreness, increase energy and elevate food. but the thing is, DIY ice baths are a colossal hassle and basically impractical, making the whole thing unsustainable, which is a problem solved by the guys at Plung, who pioneered the solution All in one: This beautiful and stylish modern bathtub that is easy to install indoors or outdoors.

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One of the solutions to providing greater opportunities is to better democratize access to higher education and you know one of the things you talk about a lot is how we. We need to reform those institutions that have become luxury brands that thrive on scarcity instead of being public servants trying to raise the kind of entry-level intelligence of younger generations, as if we tend to believe that my colleagues and I we are in some way. We are nobler than the rest of the population and we sit with our Labradors and our corduroy vest watching PBS thinking about how to make the world a better place and there is something to that.

I have notable colleagues who are good people, but we are like everyone else. Additionally, I think we woke up a lot of administrators and leaders on campus who wake up and ask themselves the same question every day when they look in the mirror: How can I increase my compensation while reducing my liability? And we found the ultimate strategy that I call the The lvm strategy when I went to UCLA the facilities were shit but 76% got in and it was $400 and what they discovered, as I know, kept the admission rates static and low when the dean announced that we rejected 92% of our applicants this year.

At NYU we stand up and applaud and the alumni love it because their degree increases in value and this same lvm rejection strategy has been adopted throughout the broader economy. If you own a home, you worry a lot because you're in Malibu Canyon. I bet any property owner in Malibu Canyon has a real interest in new plans for new development and shows up and is very concerned and presents well thought out reasons why new developments never get permits and the result is that we have shortages every year. We need between 1.2 and 1.5 million homes and then there are big companies that use the government as a weapon and make it increasingly difficult for small businesses to emerge, so the result is that the incumbents see the value of their assets, but people can't get any of that.

These schools Harvard has an endowment of 53 billion dollars, which is the GDP of Costa Rica, and has maintained its first-year class with 500 children. A good Starbucks serves 1,500 people. They could admit 15,000 and they don't have any resource tax, so one of the solutions. In my opinion, if you are not growing your freshman en

roll

ment faster than population growth, you should lose your nonprofit status and Covid provided the perfect opportunity to re-evaluate what you just shared and create a situation through online education to expand the openness and do so. accessible to many more people and we all know what happened, what did not happen, it was not like that, yes, I speak in many corporations, in many large companies, and they will say what can we do, the first thing that a corporation could do.

To improve this is to stop fetishizing graduates from Elite universities when I went to work for Morgan Stanley, they recruited at Stanford and Berkeley and I was the first analyst they hired at UCLA. UCLA wasn't good enough for them and I fell for it. trap when I started my company I fetishized hiring people we only hire people from Berkeley Stanford UCLA and for some reason UVA we had people from UVA when you decide you are only hiring from Elite universities you are saying no If you are interested in single mothers you immediately exclude people who don't even have rich parents are incredibly notable, so my recommendation.

I was talking to co Salesforce about this shift from a certification-based hiring strategy to a skills-based strategy, how? find out the tests and it is expensive and it is difficult to hire really talented young people based on their skills rather than their certification because the reason we have entered into this LV Mage strategy in Elite universities is that corporations love it , people think that our student is our consumer no, our consumer is our product, our consumer is the corporation and the corporation basically outsources the selection and hiring at these universities thinking that if they only live with 8% of their applicants, they should be pretty good MH, so corporations move on to a certification.

I say 10% 20% 50% of our applicants and I'm not talking about white-collar jobs, I'm talking about professional jobs that will be reserved for people based on a skills-based assessment where you can't get a blind certification. Getting past reception without an elite college degree at Morgan Stanley when I was there, tech isn't a little bit different, although I feel like they're a little bit more progressive in terms of how they hire because they look at skills and it's a little bit more independent of pedigree, that's kind of true, especially when it comes to programming, but I would say that if you want a job in a traditional career path and you know your alphabet, it's pretty hard to get it without an elite MH degree and it's a coping mechanism. self-reinforcing because they are so populated with people from incredible universities.

I mean, this goes back to why it's so important to get out of your house and be social because a study was just done on Google and a hiring manager says we post a job opening for a product manager, we immediately get 200 resumes and We reduced them because we don't need more than 200, we decided to bring in 20 people and of the 20 people, the hiring we make is almost always someone who was recommended internally, so if you want a job, you better have a lot of friends, MH, Uh, but I don't know. I think technology is probably a big offender.

I think tech founders often don't have college degrees if you're an AI engineer, that's fine. I don't need a degree, but I would say that in most jobs' favor, professional jobs still fetishize an elite college degree. Part of getting young men out of the basement and into the world and face to face with people requires some modeling. of that healthy behavior and I think what's so powerful about who you are and how you present yourself is that you're a really successful guy, but you're also like an alpha guy who's progressive and sometimes Ry, like you're not afraid . to tell a dirty joke you are strong you are in shape and you know what you are talking about when you talk about economics and social sciences Etc. why aren't there more people like you well you are being generous, let's analyze that, remember the Presidential Fitness Awards, I'm sure it was going to figure out a way to get three years in a row and then I had a big push in the eth degree and didn't get the badge and it was devastating. for me and I started doing pull-ups every day until I was back to doing seven pull-ups, which is what I needed, we've become so politically correct that we romanticize obesity, you're finding your truth, no, no, you're finding a fan I mean That doesn't mean we shouldn't have empathy, we shouldn't come up with programs to give people in food deserts the opportunity to eat healthier, but we should celebrate that Fitness is one of the first things I tell men if I train a young man, lean on your strengths as a man, we have a higher or denser bone structure, a lot more muscle and then testosterone is poured on him.

I think any man under 30 should be able to walk into any room and know that if they become real they could kill and eat everyone or leave them behind and it's an incredible feeling that will make you a kinder man, who breaks up fights in the bars, a big, strong man who is a nicer guy who has an easier time finding willing companions. protect others who are going to be less depressed make more money Exercising and celebrating strength is a wonderful thing, especially for men, it's key and then we've become so politically correct in terms of potentially standing up for people, people who were The most profane tended to be the most liberal.

Lenny Bruce Richard, before George Carlin and on the far left we became such snowflakes that I think what hurts people by being elected to implement many of the policies that I am promoting is that we consider them humorless, like at some point. We will be able to celebrate our differences. I co-host a podcast with Caris Switcher, who is lesbian. I make fun of her sexual orientation. I make inappropriate jokes and then there's a pause and she laughs and gives everyone else permission to laugh. I think that is. The really big social networks have created this infrastructure where you get gotcha keeper points.

If someone says something out of character, you go after them and I think it's horrible and I purposely increase the bad language because I say, for God's sake, you know. The left needs to bring back bad language and vulgarity, that doesn't mean you're a bad person, but what you do also matches your compassion and vulnerability because I think what you just shared is also the portal to evil. influence on the Internet, like getting your bed in shape, eating right, you know, showing up whenyou say you're going to show up, those are all solid, solid principles, it's good advice, but too often, as you were sharing before, it's kind of uh. the beginning of a slide into a darker world and those influences seem to take over too large a percentage of the Internet and capture the minds and the fascination of these young men who are looking for good influences and simply take what is available and what appears. when they scroll through their feed, like why are those the voices that rise to the top and a more grounded approach, you know, a kinder, more conscientious approach that you model, you don't know which one is rising to the top or Why? there's no more?

You meet more people who talk about the warrior mentality, but from a perspective that the Ultimate Warrior never has to take his sword out of the sheath and is a protector of those who are weaker and is a compassionate Force. for the community well, unfortunately again, thank you. I think you're being generous by conflating toxicity with masculinity. You don't hear the term masculine femininity. We have spent the last 30 or 40 years highlighting the wonderful things about feminine attributes. a celebration, it's wonderful, the women are doing so well. More single women own a home than single men. There are now 6,040 women to men enrolled in college and it is about to increase two to one in college graduates because men drop out of school in urban areas now in the US women under 30 earn more money than men, and by the way, that's wonderful, we shouldn't do anything to get in the way of that, but also try to find role models and try to imagine a new aspirational framework of masculinity that says masculinity is amazing.

You shouldn't apologize for it, you should lean into it, but what does it mean? I'm writing a book about masculinity and I'm trying to figure it out and, frankly, it's really challenging. You know, I vaguely consider it. Talking protector provider procreator when you think about the jobs associated with masculinity a police officer a farm I was in a hotel in Seattle and a fire alarm went off and these eight people from the farm showed up seven men one woman they didn't ask if there was a fire, they didn't ask what was happening, they said what floor is this, they got in the elevator and went to the seventh floor, that's it, if you look at 9/11, they didn't say, oh, these buildings are collapsing.

They just run into the building and say our job is to protect others. I think it's a great place to start for men. True masculinity is that your job is to protect other people and it is also based on our instincts. I believe it's called. The Carnegie Foundation gives an award every year or awards to people who in the moment put their own physical safety at risk to save another person who they don't know is literally pulling people out of a burning car what you're talking about. service and I think a lot of the messages about masculinity are about individuality, it's about going out and getting yours and killing the lion and getting the car and the job, it's about a kind of selfish aggrandizement, yeah, in a flashy way and striking for you.

I know it's kind of peacock, but true masculinity is purpose-driven and service-oriented. How do you present yourself to other people? But where I was going with this of the 81 awards they gave out last year, 77 were given to men. Men are more aggressive when faced with risk. Men rush to a battlefield to remove a shot comrade risking their own lives Women tend to be more thoughtful Women tend to think it's a good idea and there's a role for both and the way they I am making it a reductionist generalization, masculinity is a social construction, it is what we fill and many women demonstrate wonderful masculinity, it is not the domain of people born as men, one of those fiery people was a woman.

I go to CrossFit. I mean, the most impressive people in CrossFit are women and we celebrate their strength personally. I am attracted to men who are more feminine, my best friends demonstrate that kind of care and nurturing of that Grace, so I think what goes off the rails is that you say that only men can be masculine or that people born as men are attributes wonderful than me. What I am suggesting is that people born as men find it easier to lean towards these things and we should celebrate them. I think what you're saying about the service is something I should think about because maybe it's a better framework but a protective provider for most men.

They are still evaluated based on their ability to provide financially and if we are going to have an honest conversation, we have to have an honest conversation. Three and four women say that economic viability is a key criterion in a partner, a male partner, while it is less than one to a quarter of men we just don't really care it seems good, maybe a wrinkle in the service is the idea of ​​contribution because I think self-esteem is generated by contributing, are you being productive for something that is bigger than yourself? I did ketamine therapy on Monday and I was trying I was trying to tell myself more oh God have you done it no I haven't done it no I know some people who have done it yeah so what led me to that I call the Burning Man effect, it's like he's always done it.

I was curious about Burning Man but I always chickened out and I always wanted to do Walk and I was just curious so a friend of mine is an investor in these clinics and he basically scheduled my appointment while I was in Austin and it came up and I went but I was trying to write the conclusions for me and Richard Reeves of boys and men. Fame has this great framework and that is adding surplus value. I teach my boys. I'm like they're negative value. right now your mom spends a lot of time we spend a lot of money on you we give you more love than you give us you go to school this incredible infrastructure is spending time and energy to educate you I like when you become a man that's when you're doing enough for other people that you are adding surplus value you are producing more than you are taking I love that framework sometime in the service of others are you actually giving more than you are taking you know it's our economy is based on companies that absorb resources and then produce more than the cost of the resources they input.

I don't know how I thought about therapy Cy, but the only kind of live action element I took away from it was Like my kids keep coming around and I thought if I can love my kids more than people have loved me, yeah I can transmit more trust, concern and love to other people, that is the true surplus value and that was a good framework for me. It's like I wanted to go out with some intentionality around my purpose, that's what I took from it, it's like I have these vessels that are really open and sponges of my time, they consider attention and love, and if I think of one of my purposes as a man Surplus value is how can I do more of that for me than was done for me?

I have a very complicated relationship with my father, he was not very good to me or my mother, but this is what he was much better to me than his father was to him and I say okay, he has checked the box on the universe, it has added surplus value, but I think it's a great framework for men, really think about young men, the resources that the government, your family, society are investing in you and what's the point of this and are you actually adding more value than you are taking and many men never get there and grow up thinking that the world is simply about giving them and dedicating time and love?

I think it's great. framework of what it means to be a man. I also think that's why qualitatively, like what you're doing now in this chapter of your life, I suspect and I'm projecting, is much more meaningful to you, yes, it's a for- profits Enterprise Prof G average but compared to being an activist investor or an investment banker or just an entrepreneur in general the meaning behind it the intentionality the purpose that seems to be very clear to you gives you a sense of meaning that I imagine contributes to your happiness and your sense of direction, Yes, look, it is enormously rewarding.

I'm not, I don't want his Virtue too much. I am a capitalist. I love Money. I love making money. I think there is a great economic opportunity and to be the Wide space that I feel commercially as a marketing professor. I can tell you that I am a straight man who talks openly about his feelings. There's a huge amount of room for people to respond and people to respond, so it's a framework that I do well. money talking about these things, but the things about young men struggling are very rewarding because it's a conversation that has been unproductive and by far the people I get the most support for this work are our mothers, they come up and say something to the left. next I have three children two daughters and a son one daughter is in Chicago PR the other is a pen my son is in the basement vaping and playing video games it is enormously rewarding and also frankly it makes me feel good it makes me feel strong it makes me feel strong feel masculine , it makes me feel successful, I can influence other people and I also try to be open and vulnerable about my own flaws.

I wake up many times and continue to be disappointed. I have huge imposter syndrome. I don't know if you'll ever get it. I feel like you're about to be discovered all the time, someone is going to walk in right now. I can't even believe you're sitting across from me and you know like yourself that I'm an approval junkie, like you know I love you. like, you know what I mean, there are all kinds of layers, I understand all that, but I think fundamentally it's very important to model that kind of vulnerability, you know, I do it in the work that I do in the form.

You showing up and doing that for other people is an invitation and it allows people to understand that being vulnerable is not a weakness, it's not kryptonite, it's actually a superpower, it's an invitation to let people in, it gives them permission. other people to participate. with your emotions and feelings and not treat it as if it were a weakness or admit that something that scares you makes you a failure. It's also a fantastic way to live a more fulfilling life because from age 29 to 44 I never cried, I just forgot how I didn't cry when my mother died.

I didn't cry when I got divorced. I didn't cry when my company went bankrupt and I was bankrupt at the age of 40. I just forgot how and what What I would advise any man is to lean on your emotions when you think something is funny, learn to laugh out loud when you find something inspiring, you know, really lean on God, this really moves me, You know, when you read something you love or you watch a visualization or you see this sunset or you walk away just go into it and if you feel sad don't check it again out of some weird, fucked up sense of masculinity really lean in and feel the emotion and if you can cry because it informs you what is important to you, it informs you what moves you, it informs you what you are good at, otherwise you are just sleepwalking through life, you never register anything and here is the fear, you know, life It is a sensation of sensations and reward, fear is when you speak.

For people at the end, my colleague at New York University, Adam Alter, has done a lot of work around palliative care. You know that you are trapped in the past. I struggle with anger and depression. I'm too much in the past. I don't forgive myself. I get very depressed. I'm very much in the future because I'm successful and to be successful you have to plan and sacrifice for the future, but I'm never really here like I'm already thinking about traffic. On the way home I'm already thinking about whether I should stop him in and out and Van looks I have a friend in Westlake.

I'm already thinking halfway through tonight, about the people I'm going to meet. I'm thinking about my flight on Saturday. I'm thinking that I'm already in the future and what people regret most, when they're older, is that they simply didn't lean on their relationships, they didn't feel emotions. They didn't know and that's the fear. My

biggest

fear as an atheist. I would like to know. I'll give it back to you. My biggest fear is reaching the end. I mean, I think in the end. I will look into the eyes of my children's lives and know that our relationship is coming to an end.

I don't think anyone is going to dissuade me from that. My fear is that I look back and say, oh my God, what enormous blessings and prosperity I would have. I never imagined people who loved me and let me love them immensely, but I was never there, I never felt any of that and one way to live in the moment is to really lean into those emotions and not like that, people really understand people like that. I'm not suggesting you cry at work, there's a time and place for emotion, but people respond to it and, apart from the affirmation, praise or reinforcement you may or may not receive, it informs your life, it puts you in the mood. moment because that's My biggest fear when I get to the end is like this didn't really happen, it was a series of past and future, but the moments were very few, so,How did you make that change from being the person who couldn't cry? to lean into your emotions, was there a fundamental experience?

Do you know the seminal experience for me? I think they're very basic things and again I'm curious that you think about this more than I do, but the really seminal things in my life were my mom dying just the harshness the first time you lose someone have you lost a parent haven't you yet? lost anyone close to you? I haven't really done it well, that's just the hardest, strangest experience to date when it happens the harshness of this the finality If we could check in and really understand what death is before it happens we'd be so scared we wouldn't go out we're purposely programmed not to think about death much, so when it happens, you can just don't imagine it, it's so brutal for a lot of people.

I think it gives you an idea of ​​the finite nature of life. Change your frame. It made me more appreciative. It made me bolder and braver with my feelings to tell people how much I care. and then the other one is the other side of life Spectrum when my kids were born, you know, suddenly, like it wasn't about me anymore, my whole life, Monday through Friday, was how do I make more money, how do I get away with more? fabulous people, how can I have more sex with more attractive people and then more money and then more fabulous and then more sex and then more relevance and more acting?

But he was like the vampire in an Anne Rice movie. I could never be satisfied, it was always more. the more I want the more and then when I had kids it's a little cathartic because suddenly you're instinctively thinking more about someone else than yourself it's like my Friday used to be like where am I having brunch? How do I find more great people? things to do now I know what I'm doing, I go to soccer practice and it's boring and hard for a couple of years and then I find it quite relaxing, but having kids and thinking about other people has been really cathartic and there are just no moments.

They happen so often, but they happen. I'll be on the couch watching a Premier League football match. My boys will walk in, instinctively putting their legs over yours as if it were natural. The dogs enter. You know they're laughing at something and you have that moment where you say okay, this is it, I can't imagine anything else, this is the only time in my life I've ever felt satiated, MH, I'm serious. It sounds very trite, but death and birth were what led you to I think I moved on to the next phase, how old are your children, 13 and 16?

I started late, how old are your two stepsons, 28 and 27, and then a 20 year old daughter and a 16 year old daughter, oh so you're in the bottom nine, yeah my story is a little different, although I haven't Having suffered that kind of loss, I certainly have the experience of having children and how transformative it is, but you know my root. to vulnerability and being in constant contact with my emotional state was formed from difficulties and difficulties. I had a long battle with alcoholism that destroyed my life. I went from someone who was a quiet, insecure kid, I found out when I graduated high school.

The best athlete in school got into every college, every promise in the world, every opportunity that I then squandered until I alienated myself from, you know, everyone I cared about in my life and I was completely broken and had to rebuild my life. life again from scratch. I think that experience, as painful as it was, really gave me the tools to rebuild a new life based on new principles. You are an atheist. I'm not. I was introduced to some spiritual principles and tools that are now fundamental to the way I frame my life and live my life, you know, I owe everything I have now to the experience of being sober and the community of people who have helped me stay sober and who helped me stay sober and everything has escalated from there, but fundamentally. it's about confronting your own emotions and taking inventory of your behavior and repairing the damage of your past and having a spiritual connection to something bigger than yourself and then giving it back in the service of other people and I try to do that through professional work. .

Of course, but fundamentally my first priority is that community and that program. There was a moment where you said okay, this is it, I have to pull myself together, there were a lot of moments like that that didn't end up changing anything because I wasn't ready, you know, the elevator hadn't gone down enough and I wasn't there. I wasn't ready to let go so it wasn't until literally almost everything was stripped away from me and I had no one to turn to because I don't want to change. Do you like it? Do you like to change?

Do you like trying to let go? bad behavior and adopting new habits like it's not fun, it's not easy and I also love to drink, yeah, so I probably know more than you too, but I'm wired in a certain way that that wasn't going to work for me and it did. . For a long time it was pretty clear to me that I was going in the wrong direction and people tried to intervene, but you have to be prepared for that change, you have to do it. I had to suffer. I had to come to a place of suffering where fear of change.

I was overcome with the pain of my current experience because I am stubborn and an alcoholic, but even being sober, you know, I have overcome financial destitution and I have had other types of challenges that, in retrospect, have given me mhm strength and have been fundamental and instructive and have helped me know that everything is 2020 in the rearview mirror, everything makes sense when you look back, but at that moment you know incredibly confusing and very scary and many of you know insecurity, but I think those tools and all They are simply analogies of the things you talk about, like if you want self-esteem you have to perform estimable acts on your behalf on behalf of other people you have to be true to your word you have to show up when you say you are going to show up and it is this relationship with the It is also time that makes building a life require small consistent acts taken every day as if there were compound interest in economic terms but also in terms of goodwill and trust and all that kind. of character qualities that take a long time to develop and don't happen overnight, especially if you have destroyed that confidence or don't feel capable or don't have the facility to love yourself mhm, yes. another question um atheism is a source of strength for me I like the finite believing that life is finite helps me be a little braver with my emotions and you know I don't think this is a dress rehearsal so I'm taking the fear of pushing him away prioritizes the moment, yes, and also the people I'm so worried about will embarrass me or disapprove of me 100 years from now, no one I know or care what they think of me will be around and it just makes me feel less insecure and more bold, but in terms of faith, why do you need it?

And I think that's great, but what is it about faith that has given you that kind of strength that you couldn't find anywhere else and also what is it? the role that you have tried to present or how you have tried to present the faith to your children because I am struggling with that, my children who are 13 and 16 have not had an introduction to the faith and I think that faith in spirituality, religion , I think there is actually something very Positive aspects of religion I have always been remiss in introducing it to my children, so why do you feel that you need this instead of just your own facilities and two, what is the role that your religion in your children's lives?

Yes, they are great. questions and difficult to answer I think the way you respond has a lot to do with your own will and the humility of understanding that you really don't have control of many things and the feeling that there are more things. at stake that is outside your ability to understand, so I was someone who I assumed was very much like you, who was very driven, very ambitious, and every success I had when I was young was attributable to my ability to outperform everyone else. in the room to demonstrate getting up earlier and staying later and closing the talent deficit gap with willingness, ability and facility for suffering, pain, pain and work, mhm, that got me to a certain place, it got me to Stanford, made me a champion swimmer, all these things.

Hmm, but when alcohol came into the picture, my self-will was absolutely useless in terms of addressing this problem. I tried, I tried, I tried, but every time I tried to use this ease that I had to address this problem, the problem only got worse and the problem. It wasn't resolved until I was willing to give up, that I really had no control over it, and that I needed to ask for help, not just ask for help, but accept that help, and as someone who is very self-directed, asks for and receives help. a very confrontational perspective, yes, true, I had to be broken enough to be able to do that, but that process of surrender that is a daily practice of letting go of my own sense of what I should be doing or what I think is the right thing to do. better for me.

Interest has actually been the most rewarding, fulfilling, enriching, and gratifying experience I've ever had, and I think that comes with an openness to wonder and awe at things that I may not understand. I think as human beings we think we can understand everything that's going on around us and I think there's a lot more going on that maybe eludes our little brains and I find some comfort in that and that doesn't mean I subscribe to one trend. particular of religion, other than to say that I am just one person and I don't always make the best decisions on my own and I have learned to involve other people and pause when I am agitated and allow others to help me, guide me and talk to me about the role you want. become your podcast suddenly, we can only do this for a while, so George George Han, who is a close friend, thinks very highly of you and says that we both share very well, we both share a history of addiction, yes, like that it's like he found you and what I'll say and this is weird but I've been thinking a lot about the ketamine therapy I did almost a week ago now this is the first 7 day period I've ever done I'm just thinking about it. and I haven't done it accidentally in 30 years that I haven't consumed alcohol and it's not because I had some Revelation that I was an addict or that I needed to give up the literally physical taste or smell of alcohol right now is very unappealing to me and That's never happened to me before, it's so interesting because I've heard about how you enjoy your cocktails.

I'm a better version of me, a little bit higher, Richard. I get more out of alcohol than I've ever gotten out of myself and myself. I know how strange it sounds but I like it and I enjoy it I think I'm good at it I think I can modulate it but I may have been fooling myself but for some reason the thought of having a beer right now makes me nauseous. and I don't know if it's the same impact or effect that those glp1 drugs have on you when they turn that switch off, but I drink a lot and for almost a week now I don't even want to smell alcohol, that's fascinating. weird, yeah, maybe go, you know, go 30 days, yeah, see what happens, you know what I mean, there's this whole movement around the alcohol-free lifestyle right now.

I've had a couple of people on the show who are advocates in this space and there's just a growing population of people who are realizing how much better their life is without it, they're not psychotic, they're not alcoholic, but you know they I like to go out and Tie One On on the weekends or every other weekend or whatever. and you just reach a certain age and you're also 59 years old, yeah, it's like those hangovers last a little longer, it's like that, yeah, when you know we're out of college, you can go out and drink a lot the next day, have a Coke- Diet Cola and a Big Mac and now you're good.

I feel like I've had a battery of chemotherapy. I mean, it takes me two days to recover and all the research I've read, I'm sure they're still finding the same research. It's getting worse for you, so I also recognize that my 59 year old liver just can't process it like it used to. I'm trying to tone it down like it doesn't. I make edibles and one of the reasons I started doing it. Edibles I just enjoy the feeling of being high or a little intoxicated, so I'm trying to tone down the alcohol and I've been substituting it a little bit with edibles, but I'm thinking more about recognizing that it would be hard for me to keep drinking and keep myself up. healthy at this age, well, you have George and me, there you go on the corner, call any time, friend.

I appreciate that when you want to answer, it's Scott, he's going out for a drink. let's talk a little about the new book a little about the algebra of wealth this is interesting, it all starts with this equation that you have around prosperity and how to think about it. I mean, it really fundamentally addresses the changing workplace that's happening. right now it's kind of a mission statement for young people on how to think about money in this changing landscape. You've seen the research where five friends who hang out together become more similar to each other and you become the average body mass type of your friends. indexes the amount of money you make with your political party, they all begin to converge towards theregression line, which is not true for wealth at the end of your life.

The same five people make exactly the same amount of money. The amount of wealth they get is highly Variant and I made a lot of mistakes. I've always made a lot of money, but I've missed out on a number of little strategies and behaviors to make sure I'm financially secure, and I think that's really important because I'm saying America is looking more and more like itself. and this is not a good thing, but America is a loving and generous place, if you have money, it is a violent and rapacious place if you don't, so there are a number of behaviors, approaches and strategies that are not that difficult and require less discipline. if you start them early it can lead you to financial security, so the basic equation is focus, find your talent, not your passion at NYU, we have these people who come, or we invite people with impressive achievements or we invite billionaires, we have decided that billionaires simply have knowledge. in life and they always end up with the same shitty advice Follow your passion M and usually the guy who tells you to follow your passion made billions and iron ore smelters and my thing is to find your talent, find something to do.

Whether you are really good or you think you have the aptitude for it, it can't be something you don't like, but most young people confuse passion with a hobby, they think I really like sports, I really want to be a DJ or I want to be a model. or in fashion, okay, just keep in mind that those industries have an unemployment rate of over 90% and if you really have that much talent you will know at a very young age that you are destined to be the next Messi or that you really have that talent. My advice would be to find something that you are good at that has an employment rate of over 90 and what I have found is that jobs are like asset classes, the more they are invested, the more human capital is put into them, the lower the performance and that there is a reverse return on your career based on how sexy your career is and the example I use as a tax attorney if you can figure out the discipline to get certified to be a lawyer you enjoy numbers you understand the intersection between taxes and law and how to handle a client, if you could be in the top 10% you will always make a good living and if you could be in the top 1% you would probably fly private and have a much wider selection. of companions than you deserve, so your job is not to discover what your passion is.

I wanted to be an athlete like you. I thought you knew that and the wonderful thing about UCLA is that it disabuses you of any notion of being a professional athlete. I went to school with Troy Aman and Reggie Miller, you're just surrounded by Olympic athletes. I was literally the worst, yes, I was literally the worst college athlete at Uccla, but that was a blessing to me, finding your talent and then committing to the 10,000 hours required. hours, the stamina, the courage, the maturity to really try to become the top 1% in something that has a 90+ percent employment rate, not a 90+ percent unemployment rate, you want to be actor, I don't want to crush your dreams, but you better do it.

Be awesome because of the 180,000 best actors in the world who are in The Saga after Union. 87% of them earn less than $23,000 a year and don't qualify for health insurance, so you better be close to Glen Close. make a living there, while other industries that have a 90+ employment rate, if you're just in the top 10%, even the top half, you're going to make a good living and this is what I can promise you, ya You know, being great at something that pays well allows you to take care of your children allows you to take care of your parents gives you prestige camaraderie people start laughing at your jokes inviting you to speak at places and anything that does that for you will make you passionate For whatever reason, no one grows up thinking that I will be passionate about tax law, but the best tax lawyers I can tell you are very passionate about it because they are good at it and it is worth it, and I am not saying that they should not follow their goals. dreams, but have an honest conversation about what it would mean to be at the top of that field, what it would take to make a living because without economic security in this country your life will be filled with anxiety and disappointment, so focus on finding your talent . and the next things are diversity or pretty simple diversification, where I lost a lot of my money.

I've always wanted to double down on my businesses and that's fine when you're younger, especially if it's your own business because sometimes you have no choice but to. The moment you have any assets, start diversifying. You know, I've taught at a business school for 20 years. I consider myself someone who knows the best ambassadors in the world and my sum total. The assessment of the market is that no one has any idea, but the good news is that the market, due to population growth due to productivity due to technology as a whole , the market is up and to the right, which is why the S&P was up 24% last year, but just seven companies were responsible for 70% of those gains.

If you were smart enough to buy Nvidia? I wasn't and unless you were smart enough to pick one of the 1.4% of stocks that sped up, you actually got really meddy returns, but here's the good news, you don't need to be a stock picker. , buy the whole S&P, buy an index, a low-cost fund, it's up 11% a year for the last 15 years, 11% a year when you're young sounds really mediocre, but that means that means that every 21 years your money increases 8 times so diversify the other to realize the benefit of time and our species finds it difficult to understand time because most of our time on this planet we have not lived. after 35, so young people just can't imagine it and I can give them actuarial tables.

There's probably more than a 90 percent chance that they'll live another 70, maybe even 80 years, and the other thing I can guarantee is that it's going to happen very quickly. I mean, I don't know about you, you turned 30 yesterday, everything happens so fast, so if you reject our instincts around time and also diversification, you don't need to be a hero and then the really hard part, especially for a young person, is live. a bit like a stoic who says that what other people think of me isn't that important. I don't really need to order a bottle of Gray Goose in a club to impress people.

I don't really need a BMW at this age. I need nice clothes that make me feel good, but I don't really need them, no one cares that you know what you are like, that's just trying to find other means of satisfaction and self-esteem and really trying to gamify savings, try it and exercise a muscle of I save the muscle you have to develop is a savings muscle gamify it when I was in college you talk about sports I was on the team Every summer if I didn't save $3,300 I wouldn't re-enroll at UCLA So I had 12 weeks to earn $3,300 to be able to gamify it.

I hung out with six other guys who also didn't have money and every day on a whiteboard we wrote down how much and we gamified it. At $73 a week I ate bananas and Top Ramen milk and had $3,300 at the end of the summer, that savings muscle largely stayed with me. I kind of stopped doing it when I started making money and thinking I was a gambler, but if you can develop that savings muscle a little saving when you're young diversify and then recognize how quickly time will pass there are hundreds of thousands of union employees and government who never make more than $100,000, but due to savings plans and a little discipline, they retire the millionaires, so I hope you make it big with a podcast, I hope you sell a movie deal, I hope you They acquire your company, yes that's fine, but if it doesn't guarantee that you will have a minimum amount of economic viability, The good news is that I think I know how to make you rich.

The bad news is that the response is slow and requires some discipline from the beginning and this is doing what I say, not what I do because I made a lot of money, but between divorces. the great financial recession and the dot bomb and he always spent a lot of money because he was a basketball player and at some point he was going to make a lot of money. I just knew it. I always increased my expenses with my earnings and ended up at 42 when my first child came out my girlfriend didn't have much money and it was scary.

I'm 42. I've had all this retail success, quote unquote, everyone thinks I'm very successful and I'm not sure I can stay in New York and put my son in private school because I ended up with a lot less money. That was emasculating, that was humiliating if only he were a little smarter. disciplined, I wouldn't have had that anxiety, so this is kind of a note to me if I could back up and say this is not a book for financially insecure people, they need to cut up their credit cards, you know, that's Susie Orman, this is about someone who has a job has some talent knows how to earn some money not much but knows how to earn some money and a series of behaviors that will be your basis in your plan B what is the advice you would give to someone who is not a young person who is just starting out and looking for that kind of guidance that will set them up for long-term success, but rather someone who is in middle age and has had a job for a long time, maybe has a family, maybe owns a business. their own house. house, maybe they rent, but they wake up at 40 and can pay their bills, maybe they live paycheck to paycheck, but they are satisfied, they are in a soul-draining, soul-killing job and they just aren't sure how do it.

As long as they can keep doing it, there is just a lack of satisfaction and purpose and they are looking for a different way, so first of all, I woke up at 42 without much money, so 42 is young, not really, you don't. I think it's young at 42, but that probably means you'll live another 40, maybe 50 years, so it's by no means too late to start. You may have to adjust your expectations about how much money you'll end up with, but you know wealth. It's not a function of how much you earn, it's a function of how much you spend and you know, save.

I mean, there's just no way around it if you have kids and are dependent. The aspiration here would be to say Richard, you know, take advantage of the opportunity. find your passion go out do what you want to be happy you know it's easy to say when I don't pay your rent yeah you know it's just that there's a certain reality to a difficult situation I'm not sure I have a miracle solution What I would say is that a One of the keys is to have a great partner and say that you know that the children don't talk about this, but 70% of divorce requests are from women and it is generally for economic reasons.

Generally the man loses his job, declares bankruptcy or has some problem. In a sort of mental breakdown, you have to have a conversation or maybe just get lucky to make sure you have a real partner if you're married in the breadwinner of your home because if you're not happy, she's not going to be happy or he's not going to be happy and your children are not going to be happy. I mean, I had this conversation with my partner, we lived in New York and we had two kids, and putting them in prek and having my wife continue working.

We were going to have to spend about $100,000 a year because we are narcissists and we wanted them to go to the right schools. I say, okay, the tax is in New York, that means we need $180,000 in pre-tax income for our kids to go. playing with blocks, all we had was a three bedroom apartment, we needed three bedrooms and it was $118,000 a month and we could downgrade, but in New York, living in Manhattan, you can't really downgrade that much, so What we decided was: I'm going to move to Florida, we're going to move to Delway Beach, where their parents can be involved in our kids' lives, so we have built-in child care.

I'm going from $188,000 a month to $5,500 a month. I'm going to save money. 133% a year in taxes and I'm going to start saving a lot of money and when I say we're okay with this, she was my partner, we're okay with this, we're going to start putting two, three, 5.10 grand a month and then, through no fault of our own, the bull market took over and literally threw us into space, everything took off from there, but I would say an open and honest conversation with your partner. If you're married, if you're single, you can go out on a limb and say, I'm going to start a podcast or I'm going to be a diving instructor or I want to, I've always wanted to write, you can accept that kind of thing. of risks with a family I think it's really difficult and I would say the only thing I would suggest is to be really open with your partner about what you're feeling and what you're going through and say if there is a lifestyle.

Arbitration, is there a Move, are there certain sacrifices that we can make as a decision together that takes some of the pressure off me so that maybe I can start looking into things that aren't, if not joyful, are less arduous for you? Why was I talking to this famous person? It's actually a podcast. I was talking to Chris Cuomo and he just got fired from CNN andhe was trying to figure out what to do next and he says, I really let my family down. I really let my family down and that's the hardest part. all this I'm like a friend I don't know your wife I don't know your kids and I'm almost completely sure that what they want is for you to be happy you know he's a big, handsome character from Larger Than Life.

Like when you're happy I bet your house just burns bright and when you're not happy I bet it's not a great place to be so stop putting that on your family and yourself and all that. I say, just find something you don't. I don't hate that and I bet your partner would be very supportive of anything you want because money is great, but if one of you is really unhappy, oh god, that's... I mean , you are married, right? I mean, one of you is. Unhappy, that's hard and if one of your kids is unhappy, everything falls apart, so I think it's about partnering and being open and honest with another person, but there's no way around it.

I don't know how to be financially secure. unless you are born rich without working very hard between the ages of 22 and 42 I didn't do anything but work you know, doesn't sound ambitious, it cost me my hair, it cost me my first marriage and it was worth it, I got the currency and skills to obtain financial security at some point. I just don't believe there is a free lunch. I think young people are totally unrealistic. I call it the myth of balance. I mean, you can have it all but you can't have it all at once. When I Survey my children, I mean my students.

I tell them how much money they expect from me. They hope to be in the top percentile of income households, 80% of them by the time they're 30, and then they talk about the balance. in the context of an expectation, they want balance, they don't want to work so hard, they want balance, they want hobbies, they want to spend time with their family and their dogs. I'm fine, unless you're born rich. I do not do it. I know how to do it, I just don't know anyone that successful that hasn't done it for a good 10 or 20 years. She worked really hard, maybe Beyonce, but Beyonce is supposed to work 60 hours a week, so I'm sure she did, yeah. there is a certain level of obsession that contravenes all the negativity around hustle culture.

I mean, we should all be healthy, we should have a healthy relationship with the work that we do. I'm a well-rounded guy. I really don't. I know how to do it differently, so it's disingenuous, you know, to talk about it when I practice it differently and I've gotten better and I'm better now, but when you're young to live that stoic lifestyle where you keep your overhead as low as possible and you can flex some discipline to really go all out on something. It may sound terrible on paper, but it's actually quite nourishing, you can learn a lot and I think the skills you learn on your own, your ability and your own potential, are as instructive and informative as anything you're learning in the workplace.

Well, you were an athlete, so I was a Morgan Stanley. It was. He didn't have such a good education. I don't think I was as skilled as my classmates, I was an analyst Class of 73 children, so I decided I wanted to lean on my strengths. I moved in with my mom. I started saving money because I wanted to go to graduate school every Tuesday morning. I was going to work at 9:00 a.m. and I would stay until Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. yeah, I'm like I don't have anyone to go home to, that's hard. I don't have a girlfriend, my mom won't miss me and I'm physically in Le right now.

I could do it without a problem. A cup of coffee, maybe drink. I slept 15 minutes and 30 minutes at 4 in the morning the next day and sent a signal to my colleagues that I was here to play and the blessing of an athlete and everyone should try to find this environment is that I rode as a team at one . The moment you're rowing, the air going down your esophagus feels like fire, you can't feel your legs, you literally start seeing blackheads because you start to pass out, you're a swimmer, I mean, you had some of the same thing and that It's at 800 million and every time you get to 2000 to push yourself like that is an incredible gift, having the opportunity to really be forced to push yourself is a gift because what you realize is that when you get divorced you think I can.

I can't take this anymore I can't take it Your business is failing I just can't deal with this or you feel like you're feeling tired, what you realize is the moment you think you're going to give up, you're about a third of the way to your limit and it builds really incredible confidence and network and stamina and I think those skills really serve people well and other advice for young people, whether it's Fitness Sports, working ridiculously hard to find something super difficult and really trying and putting It tests your limits because it gives you a sense of confidence like, wow, I just had no idea what I was capable of and it's a real asset for the rest of your life, you're starting a small business, but the minimums are so low. when starting your own business. like, oh my god, I'm so full of stuff this doesn't work.

I'm spending so much money. I'm letting everyone down. You know the L can be that low if you've had the chance to really test your emotional physical limits. you say: I'm fine, I'll get over this, it's not at all the limit, but I think it's a blessing for a young person, yes, 100%. Think about the discussion about people who are not archived in middle age, too There is the positive side that the world is different than it was when you and I graduated from college, there are all these new opportunities that the Internet has given us to self-produced translated into this permission to simply quit your job, especially If you are married and have more, you have all these responsibilities, children, etc., but to make that discipline more flexible and know a kind of stoic perspective and apply it to how to manage your time. like we're all wasting time now more than ever on our phones etc etc etc where's that extra hour or two hours that you can spend daily or weekly to explore what excites you and yeah and just get started to explore that not because you are going to leave your job but because it makes you feel good or fulfills you in some way and those threads, you know, I think there is a spirituality in that, if you give that energy, things start to appear and opportunities they present themselves and maybe at some point it will be a career path for you or some kind of fulfilling side hustle that you can incorporate into your life, but doing it responsibly, especially when you're dependent, I think is important in this culture like you.

I know how to reinvent your life overnight. No one successful that I know of has built anything significant or successful in the way it is presented in the media and on social media. It takes a lot of time and you have to be willing to know yourself and get over it. You know Journey is something men aren't good at. Lean on your friends. I have financial commitments, but I'm looking for something to do well. C. Gather some ideas. It is very difficult to read the label from inside the bottle. Mano has put this. Since my masculinity is tied to my sewing, I am financially secure and I am happy and everything is great.

I think developing a circle of friends and mentors or just knowing a kitchen cabinet to say I don't like what I do. I'm doing I still have to make money what you were saying you know Workshop some things for an hour or two spend some time to see if there's money in it see if you've enjoyed it as much as you thought maybe I'll tell you by the way don't quit your job daily, it's hard to find another job without a job, whatever it is, but someone who can ask you really difficult questions and who can also help you, you know what I've been doing. doing this interesting thing here or you know what you would be good at.

Never in a million years would I have thought about doing podcasting it's like no, it just never, it was definitely not on the board. Never, I didn't know what. was the first podcast I listened to was a podcast I was on with Caris Swier. I've never listened to a podcast before, but it puts you in a position to be successful by talking to people and people also love it if you have good friends, they like it when you ask them for help. right, I need to find ways to make more money or I need to find something else, like you have any ideas, what do you think you have, what did you do and we have this weird sense of masculinity that if you're vulnerable? that you're taking away their impression of you or something.

I think people like to be asked for help and I mean they are the rarest ones, as you know, talking about obscuring male suicide here, something like a large portion of men who commit suicide, no. Did anyone around them have any idea, yes, they had no idea that they were fighting. Have you seen this very horrible video that shows the latest video in pictures of these men and they generally seem happy so your own ability to reach out and ask other people for help finally in the last 10 years now I don't make a single decision commercial or personal importance without verification and with at least two or three people I confused leadership with you have a plan, you walk into a room tell them what you think and then you defend your strategy and leave you never ask people for help you never say I don't know I don't know what I'm doing I feel insecure about this I don't know, I would never ask anyone for help until I was 40.

I wish I had figured that out sooner, why is it so hard? You know I'm so indoctrinated because you know my own struggles and the ways I've found to help myself, that it's second nature to talk about what's bothering me or my weaknesses or my failures or asking for opinions and having a board of advisors and all kinds of things. of different people I call for different reasons, it's a reflection now, but it wasn't always like that. I've been doing this for a long time, but I've been doing it for so long that I think I've lost track of why it's so hard for so many, especially men, to parent. their hands, well, tomorrow night I'm seeing a group of my fraternity brothers and it's going to be a series of controlled bragging, yeah, my wife calls it super dummies, you shake their hands, super.

I'm cool, you know it's just a facade, you know it is. all shit, yeah, I did this, I bought these stocks. I would have my best mother's check. They all come fighting for the check. No one would say: Do you know what my child needs? Can anyone else? I mean, no one would say that. a set of things like, look at the right thing, I think because men are evaluated based on their economic vitality and their performance as a whole, they just really hate asking for help, I think that's the blessing of the addiction community or like we call it the The recovery community is that they just left that aside.

My feeling that the community is the first sign. You are struggling, the first sign is to reach out to other people and that is a gift. I bet a disproportionate number of men never develop that skill. Women are much better at that. that men rely on their social networks. I mean, we're dealing with a situation right now where men account for 77% of suicides, and rising, we're going to have four to one suicides among men and women. How much of that do you believe? This is related to this epidemic of loneliness that we are seeing. I think it's loneliness, so I'm going to flex now.

I'm talking to the Department of Homeland Security about AI and they're saying, what are the threats from AI? becoming sentient, is it a test of AI? um misinformation, are they self-healing super weapons? I'm like, okay, I think short term, miss misinformation. AI-tested misinformation is a threat. If I were Putin, I'd be flooding the Zone with misinformation that would make Biden look a little older, you know, I think that's the short-term threat, the long-term threat is taking advantage of the loneliness of men, one in every seven men do not have a single friend, one in four men cannot name a friend, the number of men who see their friends every day in high school has been halved so that they do not see their friends .

They do not have romantic relationships with Sheris. Excellent railings. The only reason I stopped smoking weed every day was because my girlfriend said yeah you. Don't get together, I'm going to stop having sex with you, right? That's a tremendous motivator for a young man if he wouldn't have had the prospects of a romantic relationship if he hadn't had the barriers of going to the office. every day, which many men don't do. I just think I would have smoked weed and watched BL of the Apes all day. True, it was a good life for me. I enjoyed that so many men have now moved away from people and railings. to this mix of algorithms and screens that are becoming very lonely and I said that the scenario that I see as the greatest threat to the Homeland in defense is that if I were an adversary or a bad actor I would identify the two or three million very lonely. men who serve in the military or in our ports or our critical infrastructure and I would develop a very sophisticated network of AI friends who start a relationship with them and make them feel good.

They canbe three 3 months 6 months 12 months send them. more and more erotic images, you're funny like the movie Her MH and you get them more and more involved and all you need is 0.01% of them would be 3000 and at some point you turn it around and say you know what real leadership and people do. real men. Do they fight against Tyranny? What is Tyranny? Tyranny is your own government and when this box arrives in port I don't want you to check it or you are in an attack on an aircraft carrier off the coast of the Mediterranean. turn this switch off, don't turn it on, turn it off.

I mean, I think the next big threat or soft problem is going to be a group of radicalized young people who are susceptible to AI algorithms and are so alone that they start to engage specifically in AI relationships. AI girlfriends who will essentially be in a position to radicalize them and instruct them on behavior. I mean, I don't think it's scary. I don't think we are going to have Skynet, it will replace jobs but every innovation and technology destroys jobs in the short term and then in the long term it creates more jobs just like AI but there are a lot of lonely young people who don't have any interaction with people and they become very susceptible to any platform or algorithm that gives them a sense of self-worth I literally see that as the biggest defense secret no one is going to confront us kinetically we spend $800 billion dollars no one can attack us I think we are going to expose Hamas I think let's solve it time Russia and Ukraine I think the threat is within I think these lonely young people in conjunction with AI are a big threat 100% subtle, progressive and insightful manipulation, yes, moment by moment they get a big reward.

Good relationship, they trust each other. Thinking it's real and impossible to control. Yes, sending information. Read this article. I love this article. What do you think now? Read this constantly. Try it a million different ways. Watch as tests are done millions of times over and over again every second. More and more on this road to radicalization, that's not a good image, yeah, is there an antidote for that? Getting people out into the real world separate and untethered from their phones, relationships, everything from church to nonprofit work to third spaces to athletics to leagues. I include men so that they are more attractive to women and have an easier time getting partnerships that put them in more situations where they develop friendships.

I'm a fan of national service, you know who doesn't have the teenage depression that we do? Israel, everyone serves in the same uniform, it gives them a sense of purpose, they meet friends, they meet colleagues, they meet potential future businesses, founders and co-founders, and they have a sense of purpose in serving in the agency of something else, we have to get them. kids out of the house we have to get them to make friends we have to get them involved in the dirty and ugly business of the real world and rejection and friendships and I mean we are mammals we put an Orc in a tank we just see what happens crazy, I think we're raising a generation of men who are going to be more and more psychotic and crazy, that was ugly, it's like yeah, it's so depressing, that was ugly, I think you're an agent of change, uh, and I'm curious about your Thoughts as someone who works with young people who mentor closely and AAR what is the best way to instigate positive change in an individual.

You probably know more about tonight. What I will tell you is what I do when I coach a young man. I try to hire and it's not a lot, but I try to hire two young people every six months and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and what's the differentiator, what's the difference between the person who can hear the good information or receive it? positive influence and puts it into action against the person who resists or fights well, the first thing is that they have to want to do it. I'd say a third of the time you don't show up or you miss it.

Like you're not ready you don't want this your dad told you to do it you know calm down when you get serious whatever it is you need to hit rock bottom or I don't know you can't instill will So I spent a lot of time thinking about it, like how do you make that Is anyone more willing? Without performing some type of inception, you have to be in a position of receptivity which is often related to suffering. I do not know how to do it. about what they have to present themselves seriously and the first thing I do is a series of very tactical lessons.

I say, unlock your phone. I'm going to look at your screen time and not make any judgments. I watch porn. I spend way too much time on Tik Tok so I'm not going to judge you and then say I easily find 8-12 hours a week of screen time, coinbase, stupid stock trading and Robin. I think we're going to reallocate that time into three things we're going to reallocate to fitness, we're going to get really strong or a lot stronger, and there are apps that don't cost money or cost a little bit of money, you know, my gift to you.

I'll give you this $10 a month, you know, app, whatever it is, and I'll track your fitness, we'll eat a little cleaner, we'll spend three hours, maybe four hours a week. in Fitness because you will feel better about yourself and you will be stronger and it will help your mental outlook. You have to start earning some money. I don't care what it is. Door Dasher Uber Driver No No matter what it is, you have to start earning some money, the best way to earn a lot of money is to start earning some money, some money right away, you have a smartphone, you can earn money , it's a full employment economy, right? too good for anything to work at CVS whatever you have to make some money even if it's 50 100 dollars whatever it's 200 dollars a week you have to start making some money because he'll like the meat of the money, the money is wonderful, you won't have to ask your parents for all this or you'll feel a little better about yourself and the third thing is you have to get it. every day go out and be in the agency and company of strangers right church group voter registration nonprofit writing class a league go play tennis in the park where they have round robins where you meet whatever you have than being in the company of strangers and when you're with strangers you have to be understanding and kind and introduce yourself and you'll be surprised how many nice people you meet who like you, don't like you, whatever it is, but let's get fit, let's make a little money and we'll be around other people and that's where we start.

You know, I don't know how to make goals. Don't know. I mean, no. like this or follow up. I say this is about sweat, it's about money in the company, other people do that advice applies to parents who have the teenager who is in the basement playing video games and vaping because I don't know about you. Scott, but sometimes those people have to hear it from someone other than their father, the father is often challenged and the advice doesn't come in the same way, like you know that your friend that you know comes and is way cooler than you.

No matter how great they are, my kids, especially my 16 year old son are more inclined to follow his advice than mine right now, yes, and vice versa, that's exactly right and that's how it is and probably should be that way. having a healthy rebellious instinct such that it's easier for us to leave the pack when the time comes to leave the pack when we start to think our parents are idiots, it just happens especially with men and, frankly, it's healthy, so there's studies that show that the most What impacts your children, your children, are their friends and also your friends' parents, and not what you say, but how you model it.

What I discovered is that once kids reach 13, they don't listen to anything you say, the best thing you can do. Is a model. I try to give my children good manners, so I am very conscious of my table manners when I am with my children. The first thing I do when visitors show up, I run to the car and grab their luggage. and I asked them to help me. I think you have to model it, but what you're saying is a proven phenomenon. Kids are much more inclined to listen to their friends and their daddy friends than you are, so you just try to go around them. good positive role models and also my 16 year old son said he loves him we have a friend Tom Tom Clark he said I love Tom he is the coolest guy and Amelia.

I got a little jealous and a little upset and thought you know. I should really go on vacation with that family because he is a good man, he is a good role model, he knows that my son likes him and it will be easier for him to convey important things to him, so I also think with parents about what I tell them when he extends hand, I tell you, forgive yourself, what I discovered is that if you want to believe in nature over nurture, you only have two children, you know, I don't know how yours are mine, the only thing I know about having a second son is you.

I know it's going to be totally different, yeah, you realize that they come out who they are, oh my God, and you guide them and you raise the guardrails and you know, you try to exert a good influence on them, but they pretty much come out a certain way. baked and that's not going to change well, like Michelle Obama said, they come to you and the best description I've ever heard is that you're not an engineer, you know an engineer, the sheep, you're a shepherd, you get to decide where you're grazed. You can point them in a direction, you decide what they eat, but the sheep comes towards you.

I mean my 16 year old son, when he was a kid, he would come into my room in the morning and say dress up, he would say dad, let's make a plan that I like, okay, where are the cameras? It was like something out of a Hallmark C. Easy, nice, sweet. My youngest son is a terrorist, constantly assessing the family's vulnerability so he can strike when we are at our weakest. He's just a terror, but at the same time, it's like having a stock, the lows are lower, a volatile stock but the highs are higher. She likes him, he is so funny, so crazy, so daring with his emotions and so loving, they are just different people and we just haven't treated them. very differently, so when one of them is not doing well and it is difficult to say this to your partner or I say this to the parents, forgive yourself because yes, you are important and you can shape things, but you know, the The only thing I found with my boys, you, you, give them the advice you can, give them the help you can, but the only thing that really solved the real problems that you faced is time and I see that that brings the house down when the kids aren't doing well it just brings The house falls down and it's like the parents don't know what to do they themselves are on their side and the first thing I say is I have a couple of friends who are really struggling with their kids .

The first thing I say is that you have to forgive yourself. you are doing the best you can you are a good person you are doing the best you can it is difficult when the child has difficulties it is very difficult to think about anything else that makes the house collapse yes, you are very good at technology and those in your class predictions and your 10,000-foot view of trends. I would be remiss if I didn't ask a question that I'm personally invested in: How do you see the current and future state of podcasting? What is your idea of ​​what this ecosystem is?

It's more or less about the current moment and where it's going in a way that maybe we know is contradictory. I don't know if it's contradictory, but podcasting in many ways represents where America is headed in a slightly negative way and that is its income inequality has gone crazy, there are 1.7 million podcasts. I would bet the top 500 make 98% of the revenue and 120% of the profits. Yeah, I think I might be even more biased than that. Yeah, well, Joe Rogan has 190 million downloads. He is the number one. and a really good podcast in the top 100 makes two or three million, I mean, it just falls off a cliff, yeah, and then you know, I'd bet that 99.9% of podcasts aren't self-sustaining, so I mean, do what I say, not what I do. by getting into podcasting, get a psychic reward for it, use it to market something else, but if you think you're going to make a living podcasting, know that you better be in the top 0.01% because it's very difficult , it's a small company, you know.

A successful podcast generates several million in revenue, but it is a very profitable business once you get to that point and as a medium it is not only growing but its CPMs are increasing because what happens with the medium is the message, as I can tell. how I have been introduced to someone based on the way they behave if someone high fives me I know they have seen a video if someone comes up and wants to have it or they send me a very long email or they come up and hold my hands they look me in the eyes I know they've read something I've written that has resonated when someone comes up to me I'm curious what's wrong with you and they start talking to you like you know them oh it's a podcast and a lot of times they're like oh you don't know me because you're in their head. ears, you're physically in their ears, usually when they're doing something intimate walking their dog and hanging out with their spouse making breakfast, they feel like they're your friends and that's the most rewarding thing about podcasting is that you just havefriends, it's a parasocial relationship and it's very intimate and there's a sense of trust and friendship, even if it's imagined, that is projected onto you, so I have that experience. a lot and it's very gratifying because it's like you know me.

I show myself as I am. I think it's fantastic and I think it makes for a unique form of infotainment. It is portable. You can do something else while we're doing it and I think the intimacy and trust that is built with the host is also something tremendously unique in the media landscape that I'm not sure the kind of advertising landscape around podcasting has recognized. or recognized as if it were very different, like when Tom Broka is breaking the news and then they cut to an ad that he doesn't endorse the product that ad is running regardless of anything the host reads, yeah, and so on in podcasting when a presenter says Hey, listen, I found this product, I think it's great, you know, here's why and there's that implicit trust that's been built over many years, yeah, there's a lot more value in that that I don't know if you totally appreciate it and I also think that at the same time, podcast advertising is wildly undervalued in terms of marketing spend and it's confusing to me why the largest Fortune 500 companies that have huge marketing budgets continue to deploy those resources on TV advertising and all sorts of other nonsense that doesn't convert when they could take a fraction of that and deploy it on podcasts that they host and talk to the specific demographic that that organization is trying to reach seems like a better plan to me and the companies that get it really get it and are building amazing companies, you know, on the shoulders of podcasters, but it still feels like a niche thing, yeah, it seems like it's a small company right now, but it's growing by 12 % year.

There are very few media outside of search and Soal that are growing at double digits in a media landscape where people are cutting back on media spending. you created a media company with an investment of probably I don't know half a million million dollars two million dollars to create a television show, a television station or a record label, or I mean, you have been able to create a media company on I like it quite a bit and you could probably pay as you go and invest as you go. I mean, I've been doing this for 11 years.

You know, I started with original gangsters. Yeah, I mean, I've been doing it for a long time and it was just. My stepson and I, you know, running the whole thing wasn't like that from the beginning, it just happened very incrementally over time, but traditionally in media you just couldn't do it, you didn't have access, you couldn't. You couldn't be on ABC, I mean there were only like three channels or starting a newspaper to start a magazine took a lot of money, so I think if you're really good at what I write books, that shit is hard, podcasting.

I mean, this is where you've surrounded yourself with smart people and you're creating a thick layer of innovation on top of it, but this is just you being you, you're a curious guy by nature. and you respond authentically like and you make money doing that, you make money doing that, yeah, now you know why I'm waiting for someone to knock down the door and tell me to get away from the microphone, that's just a gift, right, that's amazing. Amazing gift changes my life changes yours quite a bit yeah well I appreciate you man I gotta let you go but I think you're a real service you know?

I think your message is really important and there are so many people who need it. good advice and solid mentorship and the fact that you do it digitally and in person with clarity of thought and in this mission-based way that you do it, I think that's really noteworthy and I just want you to know that as I do. . I recognize you for that and I am at your service. I think it's a fantastic thing, so with your sales, my friend, that means a lot coming from me. I feel the same way I started looking at your stuff.

I think especially you. Well, I know you're impacting people when they really need it and I mean, let's take a moment to realize how ridiculously lucky we are to be able to do this kind of thing and make some money. It's very rewarding and just hearing you talk about it makes me reflect, you know, my blessings, it's a good time, so anyway, thank you and congratulations on your success, yeah, thanks man, come back and talk to me again sometime moment, we will do everything. alright, have fun with Bill Maher, cheers, peace, thanks man, that's all for today, thanks for listening.

I really hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at Rich roll.com. where you can find the full archive of podcasts as well as podcast products, my Finding Ultra books expressing the change in the form of plant energy, as well as the plant energy in meals meal planner. ritual.com, if you want to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts on Spotify and YouTube and leave a review or comment supporting the sponsors who support the show.

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