The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: Professor Scott Galloway: “This Is An Emergency!” The Number Of Men Having No Sex Increased 180%! (Why This Is Dangerous & How We Fix It)

Someone dies in the UK every 90 minutes, 76% of these are male.

What is going wrong?

If you were to point to a single point of failure, it would be the...

Scott Galloway.

Entrepreneur, best-selling author.

Professor.

One of the most desired minds when it comes to business and life.

He is about the obsession of how to be better as individuals and as a society.

Society tells you, especially I think as a man, that your worth is highly correlated to your economic success.

But for the first time a 30-year-old isn't doing as well as his or her parents.

Men under the age of 40 are 24% less wealthy.

The average age of a first-time home buyer is 47 now.

It's an online dating.

You have to swipe right a thousand times.

You got a single coffee.

It's one in seven men, doesn't have a single friend.

We're going to have men having relationships with machines.

The most dangerous person in the world, a lonely, young, broke male.

And we're producing millions of them.

And that can lead to very ugly places for the economy and society.

What is the impact this is having on women?

Women have become better educated and they're making more money.

It means that the quote-unquote pool of viable mates for women is going down every year.

And a lot of these men are finding role models online.

Yeah, this is a real issue that this is a group that's struggling.

On the far right, people like Trump, a criminal, Putin, murderer.

On the far left, as far as I can tell, their vision of masculinity is to act more like a woman.

I don't think that's right either.

We need a new vision for modern masculinity.

Do we need individual solutions or do we need societal solutions?

My solutions are pretty straightforward.

And this is the one I'm working through and will definitely get me in the most trouble.

Scott, it's quite clear that there is a crisis in society in different areas.

I called a friend of mine who is called Simon Gunning before this conversation,

literally 10 minutes ago.

He heads up one of the largest mental health charities in the UK

and they specifically focus on suicide.

They do a lot of work with men.

And I said to him, can you tell me the latest stats on suicidality amongst men

and purposeless and other kinds of things?

And he said to me, someone dies by suicide in the UK every 19 minutes.

76% of these are male.

There's 25 attempts for every death.

It's the single biggest cause of death for men under 45

and it's the single biggest cause of death for 15 to 49 year olds.

And the category of 19 to 35 year olds is twice as likely to report being in a crisis personally than any other group.

And lastly, 16 to 24 year olds are currently the fastest growing group in history to exhibit suicidality.

What is going wrong in the way we've designed and the way that we're executing upon this vision of society?

I think even the way we frame the problem isn't correct.

And that is when we talk about, if you were to say that women are three times as likely as men to kill themselves,

I think we would talk about the problem through the lens of it being a societal issue

and we would immediately move to what investments and change in behavior and education would address that problem.

When we say young men are killing themselves at three times the rate as young women,

we use terms like accountability or say things, well, if they just opened up more about their emotions

or they need to get their act together.

And that is we've decided when it comes to men, compassion is a zero sum game

and that if you feel bad for men, it immediately kind of outs you as someone who might be anti-women

or who's got a red pill because the void, the statistics are just staggering,

four times more likely to be addicted, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated.

And because nobody was talking openly and honestly about those very real issues,

that void created opportunity for what I think are some unproductive voices to fill that void and start speaking to these men.

And naturally, a lot of people now have a gag reflex when I hear people talking about the problems around them.

So the first is we need to frame the problem as this is a real issue that requires and deserves compassion and our sympathy.

It's not a zero sum game. Civil rights didn't hurt white people.

Game marriage didn't in any way diminish heteronormative marriage.

And so the first is to have a conversation that this is a group that's struggling and to stop using terms like accountability

and somehow blaming them for their own problems here.

The 19-year-old male should not pay for the sins of his father or grandfather.

Now, and my Yoda on this is Richard Reeves, but basically it comes down to kind of three things.

The first is biological. Our prefrontal cortex is not mature as fast as a woman's.

An 18-year-old woman from an executive function standpoint is like a 20-year-old male.

So or put another way, two seniors in high school applying to college, the woman is essentially competing against a 16-year-old.

And that is her prefrontal cortex had that executive function that she had it at 16.

So we're seeing double the number of women graduating from U.S. colleges as men because it's 60-40 ratio when they start

and then the ratio only gets worse because more men drop out.

That still is an incredible on-ramp to influence in economic security.

These men aren't getting on that on-ramp.

So there's biological reasons. There's also, I think the education system is just biased against men.

Boys are five, excuse me, a boy is twice as likely on a risk-adjusted basis or behavior-adjusted basis to be suspended

for the exact same activity as a girl who's brought into the principal's office for the exact same infraction.

You're sitting in front of me as a guy. You're twice as likely to be suspended for cheating on your chemistry test as a girl coming in.

A black boy is five times as likely to be suspended as a girl.

So we still have a real bias.

Now part of that is that 90% of primary school teachers are women.

There are more female fighter pilots per capita than there are male kindergarten teachers.

Men are not going into early-stage education.

And this is really important because you have an entire cohort of boys who grow up.

If you were to point to a single point of failure where all of this starts,

if you said, where did this young man come off the tracks?

If you tried to identify one signal through all the noise, it would be the following,

when the boy no longer has a male role model.

And with incarceration, with male abandonment, and with a lack of teachers in primary school,

you have an entire generation of young men who grow up having never had a male role model.

And so a lack of male role model is an education system that is biased against them.

And then I think economic policies, whether it's the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs,

the transfer of wealth from young to old people,

and you think, well, the fact that someone over the age of 70 is 72% wealth here

than they were 40 years ago and someone under the age of 40 is 24% less wealth.

That affects men and women.

I think it's especially hard on men because I think men are still primarily evaluated

in terms through the lens of their economic vitality.

So they're biologically behind women, have an education system biased against them,

and we have economic policies that have created a great deal of shame and rage.

And the last point I would just say is for the first time in Europe and America's history,

a 30-year-old is not doing as well as his or her parents were at 30.

And that creates just tremendous shame and rage.

I mean, look at the housing market.

The average age of a first-time home buyer is 47 now.

In 1980, the average age of a first-time home buyer was 29.

Young people have been sequestered from whatever you call loosely speaking the American dream

or the UK dream.

So the odds are just the forces in the face of young men have just become greater and greater,

and it's manifesting in a lot of different ways.

Lower marriage rates, lower birth rates, and skyrocketing and suicide should also add

that suicide is way up among teen girls because of social media.

So different challenges at different ages.

You're committing a lot of your time to both talking about this but writing about this subject matter.

Why?

Why does it matter so much to you personally of all the things?

Because you're one of those individuals, and I spoke to your team and they kind of echoed this,

that is very diverse in their ability to speak about subject matter.

You could talk about investing or money or business or happiness,

but for some reason you've honed in, it seems, in part, to solve this challenge that young men specifically are facing.

Why?

Why you?

Well, did you have two parents?

Yes.

Okay, so I had a single mother.

I was installing, because I'm that guy.

I'm that guy that, as a kid, lost, didn't have a male role model.

We were in what I affectionately call an upper, lower, middle-class household.

My mother lived and died a secretary.

I just could have easily come off the tracks and almost did a few times.

And because government stepped in and because of things like Pell Grants,

which are financial aid for kids in the lower, I think, quartile of income-earning houses,

because the University of California saw themselves as public servants, not as luxury brands,

and they led in 76% of applicants.

And I got rejected the first time.

So I was one of the 24% that didn't get in, and then I got in again.

But the big hand of government lifted me up.

And also, I had men, a lot of strange men step in, a stockbroker, a baseball coach, a neighbor.

I had all these wonderful men kind of step in.

And between the warm embrace of government in America that you still have unremarkable people,

men who stepped in, you know, this is nothing but for me, I relate to these young men.

And I see an opportunity.

I learn a lot of people.

I just think the problem is so much greater than the emotion and the bandwidth and the resources being allocated to it.

And it's just simply, you know, kind of a nod to the institutions and the men that helped me.

And also, be blunt, it's a commercial opportunity.

It's a chance to talk about something that's a white space.

It's so obvious.

If you think of it yourself as a thought leader, you want to be fearless and you want to move the needle on stuff.

So this for me was just, you know, slowly but surely, you just look at the data and it all leads to one place.

And that is young men have fallen further faster than any cohort in America and Europe.

And it needs to be addressed and talked about.

This idea that it all comes back to, do you have a male role model in your life?

Links, interestingly, to a lot of the data that says we're less likely to be married than ever before.

We're less likely.

Even I was reading some stats around when our first kiss happens and a man's first kiss used to happen.

I think it was around 18.

It's now, on average, into their early 20s.

Everything seems to be moving further and further and back.

So from that, I deduce that the chance that a young man would have a male role model in their life is probably deteriorating as well.

Because there's less marriages, there seems to be the prospects of dating seem to have dropped as well.

So is there a correlation between these two things in some respect?

Yeah, there's what's strange is, so you don't have kids, right?

No.

What's weird about raising kids now is that my mom was worried about me getting into too much trouble.

I think what's fairly common now among parents is we're worried our kids aren't going to get into enough trouble.

And that is we see the power of unsupervised play.

We see the power of maybe sneaking into a movie and getting caught.

We see just that it's important that at some point kids are going to experiment with alcohol and drugs and kind of better they ease into it as opposed to never do anything

and then end up at college their freshman year and just can't handle the onslaught of it.

So I think that there's something about the concierge and bulldozer parenting where we use so many sanitary wipes on a kid's life that they don't develop their own immunities.

40% of Harvard's incoming freshman class are virgins.

And I worry that, I mean, this is going to sound strange.

We have too little teen pregnancy.

What do I mean by that?

Unplanned teen pregnancy is a bad thing.

But we have had such dramatic falls in that and drunk driving accidents, which is great.

But what it signals, quite frankly, is that kids are so over-programmed and have such a lack of socialization now.

The number of high school teenagers that sees their friends every day has been cut in half that we're slowly but surely sequestering from each other.

And when we do that, we become less mammalian.

We're mammals.

We're literally, if you have dogs, dogs are happiest when they're lying on top of you.

The worst thing you can do to a dog is leave it alone all day.

And what we're doing to young people is we're kind of, they are leaving others in themselves alone all day.

We're separating from each other, we're becoming less social.

And there's a group of men who aren't received well at school, don't find a source of pride.

Auto shop, metal shop, wood shop's gone away.

They go online to date.

The majority of them get rejected.

If you're average attractiveness in online dating, you have to swipe right 200 times to get a single coffee.

If you set up five coffees, you'll get one will actually show up.

Four of the five will ghost you and decide later on they don't actually want to meet up.

So a young man of average attractiveness in online dating has to swipe right a thousand times.

So he gets validation for one coffee.

He gets validation that he has no worth to the other sex.

He loses confidence.

He starts engaging with people because he has less opportunities for random encounters where he has to develop those skills.

And slowly but surely he sequesters from society and at some point he just is not really savable.

He just never develops those skills, those skills around friendship or romantic relationships.

In the United States, one in seven men doesn't have a single friend.

One in four can't name a best friend.

In addition, marriage has become now a luxury item.

If you're in the upper quartile of income herning households, there's a three and four chance you're going to get married.

If you're in the lower quartile, the lowest quartile, there's only one and there's a three and four chance you will never get married.

So we have a group of the most dangerous person in the world.

We're producing millions of them and that is a lonely, young, broke male and just bridging into AI.

I think the biggest danger in AI, that people are worried about it becoming sentient.

I don't buy any of that or super weapons.

I think that's a problem that we've managed through those things, bioweapons, et cetera, before.

I think the biggest problem that AI presents is that big tech presents a series of low-calorie, low-risk entry points into what feels like a reasonable facsimile of a relationship.

I think I'm making friends online, but you're not really experiencing friendship.

I think I'm in a relationship with somebody.

Well, are you, are you really?

I'm learning.

No, you're not.

You're gambling on Coinbase or Robinhood.

And rather than endure the rejection and try and develop the skills and make the effort, and it is an effort and involves rejection of going out into the physical world and revealing yourself as someone who would like to be friends with another man, express romantic interest, take those risks.

We're developing these digital analogues of life that create low entry, low risk relationships.

And you think, well, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is because it leads to depression because the reason why romantic comedies are two hours and not 20 minutes is that life is about the victory of taking risks and during rejection and having a small business that works about approaching someone and getting the interview.

Cold emailing someone and getting, getting a coffee and quite frankly pursuing someone and developing the skills and deciding to put on a clean shirt and maybe shower more often and maybe hit the gym every once in a while.

And maybe text when you're not sure how this person feels about you and figure out a way to interact with someone around the nuance, nuance and develop the skills around human sexuality such that you can develop a relationship.

That is the victory. That's the payoff after the two hours and fewer and fewer men are engaging in those risks and that victory.

And I think that AI in combination with sex bots is going to create an industry where men start having relationships with algorithms and dolls.

Supposedly the sex bot industry is going to be bigger than the domestic box office receipts of all movie theaters in the US within five to six years.

So we're going to have men having relationships with machines and dolls as opposed to, as opposed to other, other humans.

And I think it's just, it creates a level of depression.

I think her should be required watching for every teen male and I think every, every teenager in, in high school should have a course as part of health on mating dynamics where they teach especially young men.

That approaching a woman and expressing romantic interests while making her feel safe is a skill and there's nothing wrong with that.

And at the end game, a relationship, a partner, a romantic partner is one of the keys to a happy life.

And I think most studies bear that out and we are sequestering for a variety of reasons men from the opportunities to have those relationships and it also impacts women.

But what we're seeing with women is two and three under the age of 30 have a boyfriend.

Only one in three men have a girlfriend because women are dating older.

They want more economically and emotionally viable men.

On the point of sex bots, it's almost, it's almost impossible for me to see how that doesn't become a huge part of male dating.

You know, I was speaking to Mustafa Solomon, who was the one of the co-founders of.

Mustafa.

Yeah.

The co-founders of Deep Mind, which sold to Google.

And in his new book, The Coming Wave, he talks about how all of these breakthroughs in technology, one of which is AI, one of which is robotics,

is going to sort of intersect with the ability to have literally someone in your house who can not only clean, you know, clean your house and do the dishes and make your lunch,

but also can love you in whatever artificial form that love comes.

They can agree with everything you say.

They can encourage you and they can have sex with you.

And dare I say, and I'm sure this might be clipped by somebody, there is a certain cohort of men who would rather choose that than nothing.

And when they're faced increasingly with that choice, it feels really inevitable to me to see how they would choose, some of them would choose a sex bot or something to that effect to fill that void.

We can all relate to that.

We all make that type of decision in different increments.

A lot of times it's easier to say, I'm just going to stay home and watch Netflix and take an edible and order in and maybe watch porn instead of go out and engage in the expense,

the emotional trauma, the effort, the skills I have to provide to try and establish something resembling a real world relationship.

And rejection is enormously painful.

And, you know, I think teaching young people rejection and my son didn't make the football team last week and he's 13 years old.

And it was a big deal.

He was really upset.

He thought this was the way he integrated into the UK.

He loves football, tried out, trouts are going really well.

Really, I came home through his bag down, tears, didn't make the football team.

And of course his mother's totally freaked out.

What do we do?

And I'm like, this is a awful day for all of us and it's a great day for him because this is what's going to happen.

He's going to wake up tomorrow and he's going to realize he's fine and he's going to develop a little bit of callus over that emotion.

And I think you're an entrepreneur and I've been an entrepreneur my whole life.

I was single most of my adult life.

I don't know.

I don't know your relationship status.

But if you're an entrepreneur and you're single, you're used to enduring rejection and that is the key to success.

That's the absolute key because the only thing you know that has happened in someone who's very successful professionally and personally is they have developed the skills to endure rejection.

That's just it.

No one bats a thousand.

You approach strange women in a strange place.

Most of the time it's going to be awkward and sometimes it's going to be humiliating because you're going to get rejected.

You want to start a business.

You keep asking people for money.

You keep asking employees to join you.

You keep asking for customers and clients.

And the only thing I can guarantee you is a shit ton of rejection.

The ability to endure that rejection is absolutely the key to success.

More so than talent.

More so than I even I wouldn't say hard work.

I'd say grit is right up there.

But your ability to endure rejection is that if you want to punch above your weight class economically or romantically, then get out of spoon and get ready to eat shit.

That is a prerequisite to that kind of success.

And technology is enabling people to say, well, why subject yourself to that risk?

You can engage in something that feels sort of similar without any risk at all.

And over the long term, it's just such a bad trade.

I mean, you were talking about porn.

Porn is the largest unsupervised experiment on young men that we've ever had.

And it's largely unsupervised because there isn't a lot of academic research on it because most academics don't want to be known as the porn professor.

So there really is a lack of research around it.

And when I coach young men, the first thing I do kind of my go to is I get their phone.

I look at screen time.

I'm like, okay, let's think of your, what do you have as a young person?

You have a lack of financial capital, but you have a lot of human capital and that's really important time.

So we're going to think about your time as money and we're going to decide how we're going to invest it.

Let's look at your current portfolio of investments.

And I asked them to unlock their phone and I say, I won't be judgemental.

In between Twitter, TikTok, porn, Coinbase, it's so easy to find a minimum of 10 and sometimes up to 50 hours a week.

And we're going to reallocate it.

And we're going to reallocate it to other things.

And one of the things we're going to reallocate it to is like, first, we got to make some money.

Are you making any money?

You got to make some.

I don't care if it's flipping on an Uber app.

I don't care if it's becoming an Instacart, a Dasher.

The best way to make a lot of money is to start making a little bit because you start developing the skills and the hunger for more money.

The second is we're going to take some time and we're going to try and invest in organizations or activities that put us in the company of random strangers.

Not just potential romantic interests, but friends, mentors.

That's super important.

And one of the keys to developing what I'll call the mojo to take those risks around romantic relationships is to moderate your consumption of porn.

One of the only reasons I graduated from UCLA was because one of my motivations for going to class was not only that I wanted to learn.

Not only that I needed to learn to graduate.

I was a terrible student, but the prospect of potentially meeting a woman who I could take to one of my fraternity parties or that ultimately might be interested in me romantically and sexually.

And if I'd had the access to porn that young men have now, I'm not sure that mojo would have been as great to get out of the house as often.

So just to tell young men not to engage in porn, I think it's sort of ridiculous.

But look at it analytically and think, OK, would you be more inclined to get out of the house, take those risks, engage in the victory, engage in what it is to be a man and be a mammal if you had reallocated some capital and ensure that that fire was still there.

So modulating, I think modulating porn and more generally spending less time online, every digital version of your life is a shittier vision of the analog version that could happen.

But everyone said I'd rather have, I'd rather have shitty, shitty kind of OK TV that's just mind-numbing as opposed to putting in the effort to do something great.

But I think it's more than just porn. I think it's all of it. Why leave the house? Why endure that sort of rejection, effort, expense?

It's not just so expensive to go out, right?

So but I think porn is one of those things that young men need to modulate and find, you know, such that they get their mojo.

This all has knock-on effects for women. And I think the data is also suggesting that the crisis amongst men is causing, in many situations, a crisis for women as well.

Because we both, you know, men and women exist in an ecosystem that needs to be somewhat balanced.

So I'd like to talk about the impact this is having on women. One of the things I found interesting, it's actually because of a young woman came up to me in a bookshop.

I was just there looking for my own book as you do, just because it just come out.

And she said something to me that a lot of women that have approached me or DM'd me have said quite frequently, which is she's over the age of 30 now.

She's committed much of her life to her career. She's single. She's tried dating apps and she doesn't enjoy it.

And part of me started to think about the fact she might be caught in a sort of generational gap where they used to meet in person.

But now the generation below her meet online. And she concluded what she was saying to me with the fact that she believes or she's starting to believe that maybe there's something wrong with her.

Because she's over the age of 30. She's single. She can't find a partner. She told me she's never had a boyfriend.

She's killing it in her career. And she was in that bookshop looking for advice from a book.

And I feel compelled because I know she listens to this podcast to ask as many people as I can the question to find an answer for her.

Because there's someone very close to me in my life who I literally text when I left the bookshop and I said I've just met you in the bookshop.

Every sentence that that woman said to me in the bookshop is the exact word for word, even like I've tried going to the gym and that's not working.

It's the same as a close friend in my life. One of my best friends has said to me as well. And there's not just one in my personal life. There's three or four.

Well, we all know women. I'm sure this happens to you all the time. Really interesting, high character, successful, attractive women, usually in their 30s, sometimes in their 40s, who will say, I can't find anyone to date.

And it's not that they can't find anyone to date. It's that they can't find anyone they want to date.

And there's some dynamics here. The first is...

Can I just interject to validate your point there? She also said to me, I'm not willing to drop my standards.

And it's like Warren Buffett said, the key to a healthy marriage is low expectations. What's happening is, and I think his name is Chris Williams.

He kind of reminds me of you. He's this handsome young podcaster who's blowing by all us old guys. You know Chris?

Yeah, I know Chris.

Anyways, he does a fantastic job. And I've learned a lot from him. But he calls it the high heels effect. And that is, every year for the last 50 years, women have become better educated and they're making more money.

In urban centers, they've now, under the age of 30, blown by, they're now making more money, more single women in the U.S. own houses than single men. They're getting taller every year.

And the reason he uses height is that 50% of women say they won't date a guy shorter than them. It's probably more like 80%.

And even if they're not cognizant of it, just anthropologically, subconsciously, they're just usually not attracted to men shorter than them because they have something telling them that this individual is less likely to be able to physically protect you.

So you're just at a disadvantage from a height standpoint. Now, metaphorically, women are getting taller every year and men are getting shorter, right?

I think men made socioeconomically horizontally and down women horizontally and up. But when the pool of men who are socioeconomically senior to women, it just means that the quote unquote pool of viable mates for women is going down every year.

And women have been told they can have it all. And what I found is you can't have it all.

You can have it all. You just can't have it all at once. And that to focus on their careers, which by the way, I think is a good thing. I think economic viability is just super important for everyone, including women.

But the reality is, as they have gotten taller, men have gotten shorter, so there's just less pairing. Society has a tendency to evaluate a woman's success through the lens of her romantic success.

Not as much for men. People look at you and think, I don't know your relationship status, but people are like, guy who's killing it. He's killing it. And he's single.

Oh, my God, it's good to be Stephen Bartlett. A woman in her 30s who's killing a professional is alone. It's like super successful. But your single status is a feature for women it's seen as a bug.

And you both might be just as lonely. But it's it's or you might be engaging in and I'm projecting I have no idea what your situation is here.

But there's this dynamic where the men who are in the top 10% can engage in Porsche polygamy. And that is women with online dating now believe there's something wrong with this that and I'm going to be this isn't going to get me in trouble, but let's rate everybody.

Most people will have acknowledged that some people are more attractive than others and they find certain people less and more attractive.

A woman of average attractiveness can have a relationship and when I say relationship that's code for sex with someone who's in the top 10%.

But that individual is probably not going to establish a long term relationship.

And because of the lack of fraction and connection and meeting people via text message or online dating, the top 10% of men are getting 80 to 80 plus percent of the opportunities for short term relationships or sex.

So they can engage in what's called Porsche polygamy and that there's not a lot of motivation for them to establish long term relationships which leads to bad behavior and a lack of household formation.

So the guys that most women want and believe that they should be in a relationship with are the least likely to establish a long term relationship.

And then the bottom 90 either have little or absolutely no interest from women.

So I want to be clear no woman is responsible for servicing a man.

But what I think has happened is this dynamic where because online has given everyone access to everyone, the majority of women are all interested in the same group.

And this group is now much less likely to engage in a long term relationship.

And the result is just there's a disproportionate number of men and women who quite frankly are just lonely.

But men have a tendency when they don't have a romantic relationship to not only not have that romantic relationship, but then they have fewer friends.

They go out less. They're less professionally successful.

You know, if I didn't have a mate who told me we need to save for a house, I'm not sure I wouldn't have been smoking pot and drinking every night.

You know, she was like, if you want to continue to have a relationship and have sex with me, you've got to get your shit together.

That's a men. Young men need that.

They need the guardrail of a romantic interest, the cocktail or the peanut butter and chocolate of a household where one person is more risk aggressive.

You know, that's really important and pushing the boundaries of what can be done.

And then another person who's more practical and that oftentimes goes into gender roles, not always and sometimes as flip.

But that's a powerful combination. One plus one really does equal three.

And across every species, you see that the majority of really wonderful things, including offspring, but other things in terms of building a society are a mix of different attributes.

And so we have just fewer and fewer of that peanut butter and chocolate and households.

There are now more people not only living alone, but living with their parents than ever before because they're not establishing this relationship.

So it has, it's absolutely bad for women, but typically, typically women still are economically successful, still find places to put that love and quite frankly, don't start killing themselves or killing others.

So it's not that it's any, any, any, any less bad, but the knock on effects tend to be less bad for society.

And I went through the research from the Pew research, but also from the sort of centers of disease control, just to clarify some of these numbers for women as well.

And they, they cement everything you've said.

Only 13% of women over 30 were married in 1970.

That number has now risen to almost half the divorce rate for women over 30 has doubled in the past 50 years.

In 1970, only 10% of women over 30 were childless. Today, that number has risen to almost 30%.

In 1970, only 28% of women over 30 were earning more than their husbands.

Today, that number has risen to almost 50%.

And in 1970, only 12% of women over 30 were living alone.

Today, that number has risen to 35%.

And on the point of loneliness, I was looking at how many men versus how many women have a best friend and it's, it's multiples more.

So multiple more women are fine.

Still have relationships regardless of this state of affairs, because they're better at, as you say, forming social connections in non-romantic relationships with other women than men are.

So it's a pretty, it's a pretty bleak picture.

And maybe most importantly of all, there's a clear direction of travel here.

And if you extrapolate out that direction of travel, we don't get to a good place.

Population decline you spoke of and how that lopsided society, depression, mental health, suicide.

So the question becomes, for me, what would you advise young men?

You talked about money.

So that was really interesting.

So maybe we start there, personal finance and establishing that.

I'm a young man.

So say 21 years old, what have I got to do with my money?

Where should I be putting it?

How should I be earning it?

So I think the three legs of the stool, we're going back to reallocating capital as a young man.

One, start making some money to put yourself in environments where you might have a random encounter with a stranger.

Also, and I know you engage in this, we're going to reallocate four to six hours a week to physical fitness.

Feeling strong, feeling in shape is one, there's studies coming out now that it's supposedly 50% better than pharmaceuticals and talk therapy.

Two, you'll be more attractive to mates.

You'll feel better about yourself.

You'll be more kind.

I think that is incredibly powerful.

But in terms of economic success, and I have a book coming out of March on this, I think there's a basic algorithm to financial security or economic security.

The first is focus.

And that is focus, find something.

I hate the term, follow your passion, because typically people mistake passion for a hobby.

And then they go, I should be a DJ or I should be an athlete or I should open a restaurant and they choose industries with the unemployment rate is 90 plus percent.

You know, the riders are on strike in Hollywood.

The number, there's 180,000 people in the actors union, SAG or AFTRA.

And the percentage of them that don't or that make more than $24,000 a year to qualify for health insurance is 12.5%.

So I would argue that there's under or unemployment for nine and 10 actors.

So find something you're good at that, that where there's an employment rate of more than 90%.

And I want to be clear, some people follow their passion and it pays off hugely.

Jay Z followed his passion is now a billionaire.

But I tell young men, assume you're not Jay Z.

Find something you're good at that has more than a 90 plus percent employment rate, which is 99% of professions.

And then invest the requisite 10,000 hours, perseverance, grit, willingness to break through hard things, willingness to suffer injustice, which is a guaranteed attribute of the workplace and get really, really good at something or at least have a path to being great to something.

Also, in terms of being attractive to potential mates, there's very few things that are more attractive if you're not already economically successful than a plan.

This is my plan, right?

That's what I think Romantic, potential brand partners want.

You don't need to be a ball or you don't need to be driving a Porsche.

You need to have a plan and that plan might change.

That plan might not work out.

We got to have a plan.

So the first is we're going to focus and we're going to find something we're good at and not only something we're good at, but something people will pay us for.

That's the first thing you got to make money.

But the second component, the key to wealth isn't as much how much money you make.

It's your ability to live a little bit like a stoic and live below your means.

And that's one thing I always did.

I always lived below my means.

I never had debt.

I never used credit cards for stuff.

And that is incredibly hard in our society where every talented person and now AI and algorithms are finding you at a moment of vulnerability and convincing you that you need a new set of.

On trainers that, oh wait, it's worth it to upgrade from economy to economy comfort to economy plus to business class.

I mean, it's just the market's ability in a capitalist market to find you a product you must have when you have any disposable income is just remarkable.

There are so many amazing ways to spend money in London and New York that to not spend it all and or not spend more than all.

That is real discipline.

That shows incredible character at a young age.

You need to live like a stoic.

Your advantage as a young person is quite frankly to live in a fucking shoebox and spend no money on rent, spend no money.

I used to make it a game once summer at UCLA and this was more out of survival or need.

But if I didn't make $3,300 between my junior and senior year at UCLA, I wasn't going back to college.

I owed the fraternity a ton of money.

I wasn't going to be able to pay my tuition, so I had 11 weeks to make $3,300.

And I figured out if I just lived in the fraternity in a shitty little room that I was paying no money for and I only ate top ramen, bananas and milk, I could save.

I could live on $110 a week.

That was my total budget and I could do it.

And when you're a young man and not only that, it was still a fun summer.

I would still go, we would pool money and go buy a case of Schmitty beer.

And then on Sunday, Sunday nights, we'd go to Sizzler, this tacky restaurant in LA for a Bruin special Malibu chicken and all you can eat salad bar.

And I used to go with the other members of the crew team and just clear them out and spend three hours gorging.

But we still had a good time.

But when you're young, I think you want to lean into this great thing where you don't have to spend money.

It is impossible not to spend money when you get a little bit older and you start collecting dogs and kids.

You can't sleep on someone's couch.

You can't sleep in a shitty apartment.

You can't walk to work.

You can't live on top ramen and bananas.

So the ability to gamify and really try and live below your means.

And then that creates an army of capital.

And that army of capital goes out for you and starts making money for you when you're in your sleep.

And that goes to specific investment advice.

The first is, and people don't like to hear this, do away with the notion that you are brighter than anyone else and going to be able to figure out individual stocks or investments that allow perform the market.

I can't convince you of that 100% and some of it is fun.

And if you want to learn about a stock and you want to buy NVIDIA or you want to buy DojaCoin, fine.

But try not to do it with more than 30% of your saved money.

Try to take two thirds plus of your saved money and put it in low cost ETFs and index funds.

Because here's the thing.

Our flaws as a species is we don't realize how fast time goes because the majority of us for the majority of history have died before the age of 35.

We can't process how fast time is actually going to go when you go past 35.

At the age of 39, we stop.

We have no longer have the ability to process the way we change in terms of our own physical appearance.

So from the age of 39 on, and I can validate this, every time you look in the mirror, you're like, fuck, what is that?

Because you can't process what is happening to you because for the majority of your species history, you weren't around post 39.

You and I hopefully will be sitting here in 20 years or over a beer and I'm going to look at you and I'm like, how fast did it go?

And you're going to be like, Jesus, like a blink.

And so if I said to you, Steven, give me 20, give me, find out a way to save a thousand bucks, a thousand bucks.

And in a blink, it's going to be worth 6,000 because I have this magic box.

How hard would you try to get as many as much of that capital to put in that box?

The power of diversification and time, because if you diversify, I can get you 6, 8% a year, right?

Every day, 51% of stocks go up, 49% go down.

But if you invest in any five S&P stocks over 10 years and don't trade them, no one has ever lost money.

85% of day traders lose money.

If you buy five stocks, put them away and never look at them again.

Ten years later, no one has ever lost money.

And that's where diversification, and this is where I really screwed up.

I didn't understand the power of diversification.

Successful people fall into the trap of thinking, I'm a baller.

I'm smarter than everyone.

I'm going all in on Cisco because everybody wants internet infrastructure.

I'm going all in on Amazon.

If you went all in on Amazon in 99 and 24 months, you had lost 90% of your principal.

Even Amazon, the best companies in the world, if you look back, the majority of them have had 24 month periods where they went down 90%.

If you had held on and you didn't day trade and you didn't look at your stocks, you'd be up 30 or 50 acts now.

So the power of diversification and also a recognition that time is just going to go so much faster than you think.

So focus, find something you're good at that people will pay you for.

Live like a stoic.

Spend less than you save so you can develop an army of people who are killing it or killing people and invading the earth while you're in your sleep.

Recognizing the power of diversification and then appreciating how fast time will go.

And not trading stocks, just let time take over.

If we give every baby, and this is a potential solution to what I think is going to be an oncoming crisis among seniors or too many of them that we can't take care of.

If we gave for $40 billion from the US budget, we could give every baby $7,000.

And I think we treat them like infants and we put it in a savings account, ETFs, diversified.

By the time they're 65, just with that $7,000, if you didn't let them touch it or trade it, it'd be worth a million bucks.

So the fastest way to get every senior a million bucks and granted it's 65 years from now would be to give every baby $7,000.

And that just shows you the power of compound interest and time and diversification.

I think it's fairly simple, those four things, but they're not easy to do.

But everyone can do them.

Almost everyone can do them.

And for anybody who really is, they've got $3,000 in their savings account.

They have never invested a penny before in their life.

They don't know any of the terminology we just used.

They don't know what Vanguard means, they don't know what low fees mean.

What is the simple way of getting them on the right track from that point of, I drive taxis, I've got $3,000 in my bank account or $500.

What do I do?

Go to Charles Schwab or public.com, open an account.

And first off, find out.

The equivalents in the UK are like Hargreaves lands down.

You can do a lot of this stuff on a lot of different apps where you're picking a fund, right?

Go into SPY or go into an index or an ETF that buys a bunch of stocks for you.

Make sure it's low fees.

And find out, and I wish I knew more about the tax law here.

Find out if your employer or the government offers you some sort of tax advantage vehicle.

In the US, it's Roth and 401Ks.

We have ISA, we have a retirement system where you can invest in your retirement.

You have to understand that shit.

And if you don't understand it, find your daughter or someone who can explain it to you.

And then the key is just start and put it in an ETF or an index fund that tracks the entire market.

Low cost, low fees.

And find out if you have access to anything that's tax advantage.

But the key, the key is to start.

They only have $100.

Christ, again, that $100 in 20 or 30 years will be $1,000 or more.

And not only that, it gets you a taste for flesh.

I remember I went on my first safari and they said,

unfortunately, we have one lion attacking human.

And now all of them appear to have a taste for human flesh.

They never used to go after humans before.

But once they get a taste for human flesh, they're like, oh, this tastes pretty good.

Let's start killing people, killing and eating people.

Just $100.

And then you wake up and you're like, oh, it's worth $108.

It's worth $112.

You get a taste for the flesh of how powerful money and time in investing is.

And just start.

I also think it starts to make you feel in a weird way.

I think it makes you feel, and I'm just saying this because I can relate to it as a man,

I think it makes you feel masculine to feel like I'm taking care of myself.

I'm strong enough to live below my means.

Discipline, isn't it?

Yeah, it's like working out.

You just feel better about yourself.

And I think living below your means and creating an army of capital,

everyone talks about starting a business at scale so they can make money in their sleep.

That's our goal.

You can make money in your sleep by saving it and investing it.

But the key is just to start.

I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify

and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast

haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this.

I would like to make a deal with you.

If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button,

I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.

I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button.

The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production,

bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do this thing we love.

If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button,

wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me.

That is the only favor I will ever ask you.

Thank you so much for your time. Back to this episode.

Scott, every time you mention male role models,

your demeanor changes a little bit.

Say more.

And I see the emotion and passion in your face.

I mean, like I said, I could have easily come off the tracks.

And all these wonderful men from different parts of my life.

I mean, this is one of my books, The Algebra of Happiness,

was optioned to be turned into a series.

And the series was going to be like an R-rated version of Modern Family.

Because this was the reality of my life.

I live with my mother and her boyfriend for seven years,

who was a male role model for me.

We were that family that they don't talk about in movies or dramas.

And that is, we were the second family.

Terry was married with kids.

And every other weekend, he used to come spend with me and my mom.

And you immediately think, this is a bad person.

He was wonderful to me.

He was a great role model. He was generous.

He was kind.

He taught me a lot about what it meant to be successful and a good person.

And after him and my mom broke up,

he reached out and kind of tried to stay involved in my life.

You know, I had, I had men like that.

I remember meeting men.

I met a camp counselor who would just stay in touch with me.

And he was in technology and he taught me a little bit about programming.

And here's the thing. Here's the thing, Stephen.

And this is, I mean, the bottom line is when we go to solutions,

the number one solution for what ails young men is other men.

And that is, if we want better men, we have to be better men.

And I think the ultimate expression of masculinity,

where it shows you're powerful, you're strong, you're smart,

is when you get involved and irrationally passionate about the well-being of another child.

That is, that shows you have hit a certain level of success.

And unfortunately, I was on Bill Maher.

I'm doing a lot of name dropping right now.

And I said that and Bill Maher immediately went,

well, I'm not going to get involved in any 15 year old boys life.

They're going to think I'm a pervert.

And the reality is the Catholic Church and Michael Jackson have fucked it up for all of us.

And that is 99.99% of paternal and fraternal love that men want to display

and get involved in a young man's life is positive.

And society has taught us to be suspect of those men.

And it's a real shame because those random, generous men who came into my life

were instrumental in my development and turning into a productive citizen.

I think a lot of men have those, the inclinations and that desire to get involved.

And the good news is these young men in need of guidance are everywhere.

Sometimes it's just your friends' kids because biologically,

kids start pulling away from their parents because they need to get out,

you know, leave the nest.

So they start thinking anything your dad says is just wrong and stupid.

But your dad's friend, when he says the exact same thing,

you kind of nod your head and it makes sense.

And young men who need guidance are everywhere, everywhere.

You know, my nanny's kid is struggling.

Your friend's kids are struggling, young boys are struggling.

I get emails every day from dozens of young men who are clearly just like,

good kids trying to figure it out.

They're just trying to figure it out.

And they want a little bit of reassurance and a little bit of guidance

in someone just to tell them that they matter, right?

But yeah, that the number of men just randomly with no self-interest

who got involved in my life was just, I mean, literally a gift.

Several of them.

And a lot of these men are finding role models online like Andrew Tate,

who is, many people describe as a symptom of this, of this crisis.

Is there anything that Andrew Tate says that you fundamentally agree with?

I understand there's a lot that you have a different opinion on,

but what is it that he says that you think has holds merit?

I'll go for it now.

I think the majority of what Andrew Tate says is probably positive.

It starts from a really good place.

Take accountability for your actions, be in great shape, be action oriented.

But it then kind of comes off the rails.

And then one of the ways you kind of take accountability or take action

is to try to start treating women as property.

Is to sign up for my class on how to trade crypto,

which makes Trump University look like Harvard.

I mean, it's just, it's a bit of a grift.

And I also think that it, what starts off as positive.

And that's most, quite frankly, that's the most dangerous thing about it

because you can imagine a young boy, a young man, just agreeing with most of it.

And so then they adopt the last 10 or 20%, which quite frankly is just really ugly.

It's just misogyny.

What do you think about the Bugatti and the Lamborghini and...

Hey, look, a young man wanting to acquire items that signal power and strength such that

in a panoramic watch that I haven't wound in 10 years.

Okay. How is that any different?

Right? Because I want to signal my attractiveness and success to strangers.

Right? So yeah, that's, I get it.

I get it, but you know, the baller, the guy who ends up with more,

what I'll call, lasting opportunities and quite frankly, more mating opportunities

is the guy who buys a Toyota and is saving money and is the first guy in his cohort to buy a house.

I think the majority of people are less impressed by your things than you think.

They're thinking about your shit less than you're thinking about it.

I think people are really impressed with discipline and a plan.

I used to believe, I think up until maybe two years ago,

that I no longer was in search of status to some degree,

or maybe like 70% I believe this, because I no longer have lots of material possessions.

You won't catch me and I mean, other than the car that you arrived here in,

that's the nicest possession I own.

I don't have sports cars. I don't have luxury items or watches or anything.

And then I read a book by a guy called Will Stahl,

who's been on this podcast, I'm sure the book's behind me somewhere,

who told me that we just, the status games that we play just change over time.

So instead of logos, we care about the size of the boat,

or even Jack in his profession as the director of this podcast

is playing a status game of cameras and production quality.

And that really changed my perception.

I used to be quite judgmental once I'd lost all my Louis Vuitton

and all that stuff that I used to buy of people demonstrating status.

And I arrived at the conclusion that it's actually innately human.

It's part of belonging and feeling valuable amongst our tribes,

is playing these status games.

And I guess that's what the Bugatti is a metaphor of.

The wealthiest man in the world, Bernard Arnault,

and it's usually the Bernard or Musk,

but the wealthiest man in the world figured out that,

you know, we want to feel basic instincts.

The most basic instinct is survival, but a close second is propagation.

What's that mean? Sex.

And so the way you communicate your worth as a maid

is by one showing that you have a Bugatti,

because what it means is I'm successful and strong.

And if you have sex with me, your kids are more likely to survive

than if you have sex with someone driving a Honda.

And women spend a great deal of money on ergonomically impossible shoes

and expensive creams and lotions that elevate the height of their cheekbones,

because supposedly that means if you mate with them,

their kids are less likely to be prone to infection.

So this all comes to propagation.

And it shows me any product that has a margin,

gross margins of greater than 70 or 80 points.

I'm going to show you a product that does one or two things,

makes you feel closer to God.

The slope on the back of a 9-11, I think the mesh and a Bouteghe Veneta bag.

I think the, you know, sometimes great art that can really still you.

You look at something and you think, God, that just gives me a moment of presence here.

That's because over time, the place we saw really, really beautiful things

were sequestered to venues that had a religious overtone to them.

The mosques, the temples, the churches, the most beautiful artisans in the world

were commissioned to come in and say, paint the frescoes on the ceilings here,

because we want to give people the impression that this is where God lives.

And people started believing them when they heard the music

and they saw the beautiful robes and the candles and the art.

So when we are around really beautiful things, we just feel closer to God.

And then the other maybe more powerful thing is it signals our worth as a mate

and the desire to be more desirable as a mate such that the next generation

is smarter, smarter, faster, just never goes away.

And the wealthiest man in the world, or it abates as you get older,

but it doesn't, I don't think it really goes away.

But the wealthiest man in the world is tapped into our need to feel closer to God

or be more attractive to potential mates.

So I have a question back to you. Where do you spend your money?

Great question. Businesses.

So investing?

Investing, starting companies, one of my new chapters of my life

where I'm starting companies and appointing CEOs or investing very early on

and shaping the company.

I have a lot of my money in the S&P 500. So just in funds.

I have some money in Ethereum, which has been there for six years, five, six years now.

It's done very well for me.

So you're more evolved than I am.

One of the reasons I bought a home in Aspen, I think,

is so I could tell people I own a home in Aspen.

Everyone has a certain level of addiction.

You're either addicted to trans fats, THC, alcohol,

codependent relationship, online shopping, whatever it is.

I'm addicted to other people's affirmation.

And one of the ways I get that affirmation is, I don't want to say,

I don't flaunt my economic success. I don't own a car.

I don't, I don't wear blingy things or anything like that.

But I do find myself telling people, you know, just obnoxious douchebag things.

I hear myself talking about stuff that connotes my wealth.

So I still haven't gotten past that.

I mean, I still do that. I definitely still do that.

And the minute it comes out of my mouth, I think you're still an asshole.

Oh, and then I do it again. I hear myself saying it.

Oh my God, that's just so, nobody needs to know that.

Why is it important to you that these strangers know this?

And I still can't, I still can't get past it.

It's still, society tells you, especially I think as a man,

that your worth is highly correlated to your economic success.

And so the reason I have an iPhone, I think we all have iPhones

because we want to communicate our worth as a mate.

If you have an Android phone, you're kind of signaling to the rest of the world

that life hasn't panned out the way you'd hoped.

That if you had been just a little bit more successful, you'd have an iOS, right?

Seriously, it's like carrying a Discover card.

I have an Amix Black card.

Do you want to talk about a douchebag?

I spend $7,500 a year for a card.

I don't even know what the benefits are, but I want, when I'm out around food

and alcohol and strangers, I want to throw down blacks.

So they think, wow, the professor is a baller.

I like him. I want to be his friend or I want to have sex with him.

And it's ridiculous in the fact that every 12 months I get a $7,500 charge

for carrying a card that's a different color.

And I mean, I hear that. And you know what?

I've done it for 20 years. I'm going to do it for another 20.

So I don't, it's kind of like, do as I say, not as I do.

What's interesting is to kind of suss out, at least become aware of these things.

And to limit them because I have a black card.

Yeah. And I think when they offered me the black card, I have, I'm like sponsored by Amix or something.

You'd probably get paid to carry a black card. That's the difference.

But no, I still looked at the financial decision and there was this one tier where it's like,

I'll give you a concierge. I'm like, I have a full-time assistant.

I have multiple assistants.

You're going to call some stranger in Dallas and ask her to eat.

I mean, he just don't do that.

I think I just went for the cheap option that comes with no perks, but you get the card.

I'm still sure I'm paying something for it.

But what I'm saying there is it's, for me, I thought just get better.

You're never going to be perfect.

I'm still going to have these like insecurities and try and show off here and there,

but just try and get better and try and, you know, have less regrettable moments.

And just by saying to myself, listen, have you gotten better over the last five years?

I go, yeah, you know, the direction of travel is good.

I think that's what matters.

Well, that is, that's what it is to be an evolved person and to be human and to be, you know,

you think about marketing, the key to marketing is A, B testing and just trying to get better and better and better.

And that's what we're trying to do as humans.

I evaluate your weaknesses and your strengths and say, where could I be investing more and divesting and what types of behavior?

Do I want, do I want to start out?

I just think that's what it means to be a good person.

Discipline and purpose and motivation.

A lot of young people that will come up to you, I'm sure, and come up to me often ask this question,

which seems to be like an invalid question, but they'll say something like, how are you always motivated?

Or how do I find discipline?

Maybe they're on the show for playing video games.

They're looking up at a screen at someone they admire and they just think,

I can't find what that person seems to have that sort of consistent tenacity towards a goal.

I sometimes wonder if in areas of our lives where we're lacking the discipline and the consistency we're searching for,

do we just need a little bit more pain?

I've sat here and interviewed hundreds of people and you often find these rock bottom moments are the catalyst for a change in direction in someone's life.

And when they're not there yet, when their parents aren't threatening to kick them out of the house,

or their best friends turn against them and tell them, listen, if you don't change your act,

you're not going to be a friend with us anymore.

It seems like just the correlation I've seen is that there's a moment of rock bottom or pain where the incentive structure changes

and people go, fuck, I have no choice now.

The pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making the change.

I think that's right.

I think most success involves sort of, it's not just sort of gradual up into the right.

There's some shock value there.

I think of George W. Bush, you know, talks about his wife, Laura.

I think the same thing happened with his vice president at some point.

They were, you know, alcoholics and basically their wives, their respective wives,

both of them in both cases said, I'm leaving you unless you stop drinking.

And kind of once they stopped drinking their lives, their professionally and personally just took off for other people.

I mean, I think there are moments like that for almost anyone who's been successful or maybe not.

Maybe it's incremental and just high character people keep plugging away.

Alcohol though, interesting subject we've not spoken about.

Yeah.

So I think a lot about alcohol.

So first off, I just want to acknowledge I love alcohol and I'm really good at.

Like Winston Churchill, I believe I've gotten more out of alcohol than it's gotten out of me.

And I think there's this myth of addiction that everyone who drinks or does, you know, engages in THC

is probably going to end up living under a bridge or be economically ruined.

I don't think that's true at all.

I think that the majority of people who engage with substances do so.

And maybe not a productive way, but in a least a way that's not going to ruin their lives or their careers.

And I'd like to think I'm one of those people.

Having said that, if you look at the studies around happiness, especially the largest study, the grant study,

where they segment people into quintiles from the happiest to the least happiest,

the most common attribute across the cohort of the least happiest was alcohol.

And what I suggest, what I advise every person, especially young people,

especially young men who are more prone to addiction to do is to do an audit of your addictions

and to go through everything and say, all right, everyone has a certain level of addiction.

What are things I just do a lot of that I could probably do a little bit less of

and then decide what would happen.

And the test isn't, well, am I living under a bridge or am I addicted?

That's not the test for addiction.

The test is, would I be just a little less shitty at things if I did less of it?

When I got really serious about my career, when I got really serious about trying to develop the economic security to take care of my mother,

I substantially decreased my intake of alcohol and I didn't do any drugs.

And I found that part and parcel of developing the professional and economic success I wanted at an early age

involved a level of just sheer commitment that alcohol wasn't conducive to.

It was when I got into businesses later where there were more about relationships and had more opportunities to go out,

where alcohol kind of crept back in.

But I don't think it's a bad strategy to decide that you're going to work and work out and invest in trying to meet people

and that alcohol can serve as a decent lubricant as a young person to helping meet other people.

It's just easier to approach strangers after one or two drinks.

But I don't think it's a bad strategy when you're on the up-curve, really trying to make a lot of progress fast.

I mean, think of your professional career.

It's like a rocket.

The majority of the fuel is spent trying to get out of the soupy atmosphere.

And then once, if you can get out of the atmosphere into the orbit, that professional momentum will take you a long way.

But it's really hard and costly to get out of that atmosphere, the inner orbit.

And when you're really trying to kill it and you just need to be kind of all in on your career,

yeah, that's probably a point where you want to err on the side of doing less rather than more.

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One of the things I've always mulled with is when we think about the stats we've discussed in the crisis

and the issues in society, the direction of travel and how we're living our lives,

more digital, more alone, more lonely, more dependent on processed foods and sugars

and other chemicals to keep ourselves seemingly balanced.

It feels like the solution must be quite deep systemic in the way that we're designing our society.

The question I've always wondered is, do we have to just rip up the entirety of the blueprint of how society is designed

to solve for these problems, loneliness, depression, sexlessness, all of those subject matters?

I don't think so. I think the solutions are simpler than the incumbents want to admit in corporations.

A key component of entrenchment is the delusion of complexity.

You know, Twitter and Google and Meta will say that the hate speech and the polarization that they've created

in the teen depression are a kind of indicative of broader problems in our society

and are these really complex problems and they kind of stare thoughtfully into the camera week.

We've got to solve these problems together. Yet, when they kick one account off of Twitter, the real Donald Trump,

an election to misinformation goes down 40 to 60% in one day.

In the age-gated social media, I think you would see a dramatic decline in teen depression.

If you remove Section 230 protections, I think YouTube would find ways to stop radicalizing young men on YouTube.

I think the solutions are simpler than, they're simpler but they're expensive

and specifically they're expensive against the people in charge and that is rich people in corporations.

And I'll give you an example. If you were to try and reverse engineer the problems in our society

to kind of one blast zone, one ground zero, I think it's what we said before.

I think it's that for the first time in our society and in democracies, it's happened in the U.S.

It's about to happen across the majority of the 28 countries in the EU.

For the first time, a 30-year-old isn't doing as well as his or her parents.

That's a fundamental breakdown in the compact between a family and a society

and they get angry and they blame the government or they start demonizing

and then someone fills that void and starts demonizing other groups and says,

oh, it's not your fault, it's their fault and that can lead to very ugly places in history.

So my solution is, my solutions are pretty straightforward.

If you have, the average 70-year-old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago

and the average person under the age of 40 is 24% less wealthy

and the percentage of wealth is a percentage of GDP controlled by people under the age of 40 has been cut in half

and a house is 12 times more expensive than it was 40 years ago but their income is only 6x what it used to be.

We have too much money being crowded into not only the rich but the old

and if you want to solve, if you were to try and have one answer that would address not all of it

but really take a dent out of obesity, addiction, deaths of despair, male abandonment, divorce, depression.

If we raised, and I don't know the numbers here, but if we raised in the United States the minimum wage,

if we tripled the minimum wage, I think you would go a long way to solving a lot of those problems.

I think putting more money in the pockets of young people

and reducing the rage and the shame and the deaths of despair would go so far to solving loneliness.

I think it's pretty basic. At the end of World War II, the top tax rate was 92%.

We just decided rich people are here to reinvest in the middle class.

When Reagan entered office and when Thatcher entered office, the top tax rates were about 70%.

By the time Reagan left office, it was 27%.

What we've seen across studies, the University of California Riverside in Newsy Berkeley did studies on minimum wage.

In Washington State, California and New York, where they dramatically raised minimum wage,

the incumbents will tell you the sky's going to fall, businesses are going to go out of business, people are going to stop hiring.

It's going to expedite them trying to figure out a way to buy the new burger tron to make burgers not humans.

And what they found was the opposite, that when you increase minimum wage even dramatically, it grew the economy in jobs

because here's the wonderful thing about lower and middle income people.

When you give them money, they spend it.

And so the multiplier effect is more stimulative than when you crowd money into the top 1%.

So if a magic wand, first thing, a dramatic increase in minimum wage.

And there's very few things we could do that would have this much impact without increasing the deficit.

And it's time. We have unemployment, unemployment at historic lows.

So the employment market could absorb an increase in mandatory minimum wage.

As a percentage of GDP, wages have never been lower, yet corporate profits have never been greater.

So yeah, corporate profits would be hit.

Yeah, the markets might go down and it would absolutely be worth it.

This is ground zero. That's where we start.

Capitalism is about a dignity of work and because there's such a demand,

there's now 1.7 open jobs for every one person seeking a job in the U.S.

I think it's 1.3 to 1 in the U.K.

We need to put more money in the hands of lower and middle income households.

Full stop.

How many kids have you got, Scott?

I've got two, 13 and 16 year old boys.

What is it the advice you give them about the world?

They're coming into their adolescence and they're going to be off dating and all of those things.

If you had to equip them with, I'm sure you do,

what are the messages you're trying hard to either directly equip them with

or indirectly infect them with in terms of values and principles for life?

For your oldest, you said he's 13.

My oldest is 16, my youngest is 13.

16 years old, Jesus. That's when it all starts happening.

So what I try and do is I think about, all right,

I want to show these kids that I want to be kind to strangers.

I want to work hard. I want to have good manners.

I want to try and occasionally someone says something,

a service person or whatever is rude to me.

And my ego is when I was your age, I felt like I always needed to restore the world's balance

and no one could be disrespectful to me or I got back in their face.

And now I realize occasionally you just take it.

Occasionally you just take it. That's what it means to be a man.

I try to be physically strong. I work out.

I try to get them working out.

I'm just trying to show them stuff because I find it's very hard when they get to a certain age

to advise them. They don't want to hear it.

So I'm trying to be that guy.

But it's not, I have an easier time advising other 16-year-olds than mine

because mine is healthfully pulling away from me.

And I'll come back, but right now he's pulling away.

What is masculinity?

Isn't that, you're writing a book at the moment, right?

You're writing two books at the moment about various subject matters.

What can you tell us about what you're writing about?

Yeah, well I'm finished with the Algebra of Wealth book.

I'm just starting the book on masculinity, but I think we need, per our previous comments,

I think some unfortunate voices have filled this void around masculinity

and I think we need a new vision for modern masculinity.

On the far right, I would argue that those forces have conflated masculinity with cruelty.

I think people like Trump and Putin and Elon Musk are looked to as role models for masculinity

for a lot of good reasons.

But I think being a murderer, Putin, a criminal, Trump, or someone who has 11 kids,

none of whom he's living with, Musk, I think that is exactly what it means to not be a man.

And when I try and try for Kate, the three legs of the stool of masculinity,

and I'm still working through this and I'm curious if you have any thoughts, but I come up.

So on the far right, let me back up, the wrong vision of masculinity.

On the far left, as far as I can tell, their vision of masculinity is to act more like a woman.

I don't think that's right either.

It's like, how do men become better men? Act more like a woman.

I don't think that's not only what men in society are looking for.

I don't think that's what women are looking for.

I think if there's a fire or Russian soldiers pour over the Ukrainian border, you want some of that big dick energy.

And I also think that women are attracted to, generally speaking, this isn't true across the spectrum.

We're having a really important conversation and everyone deserves respect.

But I think demonstrating a certain level of unabashed masculinity is really important in romantic relationships.

And for me, the pillars or the three legs of the stool of masculinity trying to distill it down to three things.

Our first protector.

I think that I was in Seattle at the Westin Hotel and I was checking in and there was an alarm went off and they said,

they closed the elevators and said, a smoke alarm has gone off on the 11th floor.

And these firefighters about nine minutes later showed up carrying each of them must have been carrying 80 pounds of equipment and axes and all sorts of shit.

And it was nine men and one woman.

And they don't look at the cameras to see if there's a raging fire on the 11th floor.

They just bombed to the 11th floor. They're just there to protect people.

Like, yeah, we might die. Firemen is actually more dangerous than being a cop.

It's more dangerous than being in the military.

But they're there to protect you.

And whether it's military or things or cops or people or or a head of household that's providing economically.

I think being a protector is a key component of masculinity.

And I also want to say that masculinity is not isolated to people born as males.

I think a lot of women demonstrate masculinity.

I think it's a wonderful attribute.

I personally end up being more drawn to friends who have more feminine characteristics, which are also wonderful.

But generally speaking, if we're going to have an adult conversation around gender and gender roles and masculinity,

I think we need to acknowledge that 90, 95% of us will have an easier time embracing these types of behaviors more commonly associated with people born as males and born as females.

But the modern vision of protection, the modern vision of protection needs some nuance and that is the trans community.

I think most men don't understand at their heart, don't really understand the trans community.

Don't understand the notion that parents and a doctor might decide that a 15 year old should have surgery and go through transition with hormones.

I think the majority of men don't, when that hits them, don't understand it.

And I think that lack of understanding can lead to unconscious discrimination and bias.

And I think part of being a real protector is to acknowledge that you don't need to understand stuff to protect people.

And that is, I think our first inclination should be as men.

This is a community, maybe I understand this, maybe I don't, maybe I do know trans people, I don't know trans people.

Clear out the politics of it, clear out your misunderstanding.

This is a community that is taking a lot of shit, even you could argue being persecuted.

Your first role as a man in his masculinity is to move to protect them, full stop.

That's what we do, we protect people and we err on the side of protection.

And I think that is a really, I think that's a really nice attribute to start from a level of protection.

When you see someone being hurt, you don't need to understand the situation.

You see someone getting beaten up in a subway.

If you see a fight about to break out in a bar, you'll need to understand the situation.

You move to protect, to protection, full stop.

That's what we do as men.

The second is provider.

70% of divorce filings are from women and it's usually a function of three things.

The guy loses his business, has a mental breakdown or goes bankrupt.

Men are still looked to to be the economic provider.

And that's not to say that in part of that is to embrace this wonderful progress women have made

and sometimes acknowledge, many times acknowledge that the woman or your partner is just better at this whole money thing

and being supportive and getting out of her way.

Because your job is just to ensure, play a role that you can provide for the family.

And then getting to a point where you can take care of yourself, take care of your family

and then start to expand the circle and start taking care of extended family.

Start taking care of the community, donations, philanthropy.

I think that's a real, to be a provider for people that ultimately you don't know is a form of masculinity.

To plant the seeds of trees that you will never sit under, the shade of which you'll never sit under.

And then the final one is procreator.

And this is the one I'm working through and will definitely get me in the most trouble.

But I do think that part of masculinity is being the initiator in a romantic relationship and pursuing romantic relationships.

And there's a difference between pursuit and being a predator.

And if you don't understand the difference, you've got much bigger problems.

And because of some well publicized and heinous abhorrent acts where men abused their power.

Now we conflate any sort of initiative or aggression around establishing a romantic relationship as predatory.

And I don't think that's true.

I think men's role in being more aggressive around romantic relationships and even aggressive is a tough word.

Being the initiator, I think that is part of masculinity.

I think that's part of success.

One of the things, you know, I hope my boys, I try, I think I told you this last time I was here,

when I used to go down and do any more because it just got too much,

but I used to force my kids whenever we went out to talk to a stranger.

And we'd sit outside our house with my 13 year old, very upset because he hadn't talked to a stranger.

I wasn't going to let him back in the house.

I'm like, just go pet the dog, just say hi, anything.

But that ability to initiate contact professionally, personally, whatever it is,

is fundamental to success.

And so I think guys need to early on hopefully get comfortable with approaching strangers,

including strange potential romantic partners.

Because the stats are showing that about 50% of people who end up in relationships made their first contact online.

And it's funny, I had a podcast that we did about dating.

I won't go into too much context.

I don't want to reveal the guests, but a lot of the comments on that podcast were from young men that were really,

I think, pissed off with me, to be honest, for not speaking to the person who had created the dating app

and telling them, highlighting the plight of men in the dating industry.

As you've said, with the amount of swipes a man needs to do to find a mate,

I need to give a message to those men.

I understand it, and let's move to solutions.

So the first is, if you're in the top 10% of quote unquote attractiveness on a risk-adjusted level around

economic success, women are attracted to men for three reasons.

The first is their ability to provide.

The second is how smart they are.

And the third is how kind they are.

Personality.

And also intellect can come through impersonality.

The fastest way to communicate intellect is humor.

It's to be clever.

I've always thought, if I can make a woman laugh, she'll go out and show out with me.

And here's the problem.

So if you're in the top 10%, go online.

It's going to be champagne and cocaine and a Mardi Gras woman for you.

I mean, just, you're going to, you're going to kill it.

If you're in the bottom 90, the reality is the online dating market is a humiliating experience for you

because the majority of women and their right can have some contact or interest from the top 10%.

Maybe they're not looking, who are looking for a series of short-term relationships

and maybe a long-term relationship.

But for the bottom 90 of men, especially the bottom half have just been shut out.

They get no activity online.

The wonderful thing about human sexuality is there's a ton of X factors.

The way you smell, the way you move, your humor, your smile, right?

The way your passion for a specific topic, the depth of intellect, whatever it might be.

There's just the magic and mystery of the soup of human sexuality is so strange and it's wonderful.

But there's one ingredient in that soup that comes through online for men, it's money and for women, it's looks.

That's it.

And so it's great if you are in the top-desire for those things, for either sex.

But if you're with us in the bottom 90, it's about the magic and mystery of sexuality that can be expressed in person.

And what you find, especially with relationships that begin at work, one will say I wasn't interested in him and then I saw him present in a meeting

or I saw how smart he is or I saw what an interesting person she is and how funny she is.

These things are really hard to get across online.

And so we need to put more money in the pockets of young people.

We need more third spaces and opportunities for them to meet each other.

The number of high school kids that see their friends every day has been cut in half.

We're no longer talking to our neighbors, we're no longer going to work.

So where are people supposed to meet and find out that, yeah, maybe he's not rich, maybe she's not hot, but I'm into this person.

I want to go out with them, I want to kiss them.

But I've got so much optionality in both those cases that it seems that I value that less, right?

We used to just live in, you know, the options were my village, now they are the internet.

Everybody.

But when we gave access to everybody, everybody's now under the...

I mean, typically you're right, we were sequestered.

You went to temple or church and there were kind of eight single people, four men and four women, and they sort of paired off based on, call it, a multiple of reasons there are they figured out their way class.

Now it's like, well, I don't have access to eight people, I have access to 8,000.

So why wouldn't I expect that I'm going to get in the top desk?

And what you find is that the metrics are so crude and base online that, I mean, we just end up, I would task people saying who have met someone online or who have met someone offline.

Do you think you would have been attracted to that person, their online profile?

Like if you saw a picture of him and then said, this is what I do, would that be like, yeah, that's the one.

And that's the beautiful thing about, and it's important, we need more opportunities for people to bump into each other.

And not decide to give them the opportunity to kind of fall in lust and in love over time for different reasons that can only be communicated in person.

Because us in the lower 90, that's our only hope.

And if you just graduated from Dartmouth and you got a job at Google and your Rolex accidentally slips into your profile picture on Tinder, you're all set.

99% of us are not on the top 1%, we're not working for Google, can't afford a Rolex.

So you got to bring something else.

And it's important to develop those skills.

A good rap, iron your goddamn shirt, blow dry your hair, work out a little bit.

Figure out a way that when you get, if you have the opportunity to meet someone in person over and over, that they're going to be impressed by you.

And then slowly but surely, I think I'm more than impressed by this person.

I'd like to have a relationship with them.

And we're creating fewer and fewer contexts for that to happen.

If we're not, if we're not even going into work, right?

If we're not volunteering, if we're not going to church, like where on earth do we, we're not going to the movies, we're not going to the mall.

I used to walk around when I was 17, a senior in high school, we'd go into Westwood Village and we would just walk around.

We were too young to drink, we'd get an ice cream and we'd walk around and we'd see a group of girls from Palisades High School.

I went to uni and about the fourth time we passed them, one of us would take the leap and start talking to them.

What does that happen now for young people, right?

So I think it's economic policies and creating more third spaces.

I would like national service.

I know a lot of friends from Israel who met their spouses, their business partners, their mentors in military service.

I don't think it should just be military.

It could be service around helping seniors or healthcare.

But we need to give them more money and more opportunities to bump into each other and fall in love with each other and be attracted to each other.

For the reasons that are unique smell, you can't smell someone online.

And not like that, you don't even know what smells you're going to be attracted to.

You don't even know.

And so unless you bump off a bunch of people in person, we're just not going to have nearly as many connections and not nearly as many relationships.

But I think there are pretty straightforward solutions here.

Don't you think work is the most obvious opportunity?

I think when we think about social settings where we bump into people like churches and pubs and, you know, a lot of the things that used to live on the high street that have now found a home online.

Don't you think there's a huge opportunity for employers to create that sense of bonding, the oxytocin, the relationships that forged in the hallways of the office by bringing people together?

Because I have to say, I have always believed that.

And even though the world went that way with the remote working thing, my teams, including all of the teams, the 30 people that work at the Diary of a CEO team, we've always been in office.

And I've wrote a letter to them actually a year ago explaining this idea of freedom within parameters where you're trusted to make the best decisions for your life.

But centrally, one of our core beliefs is that, of course, we'll do some of our best work in coffee shops and on beaches.

But being together will make the stress less stressful, it'll make the work more meaningful, it'll make our lives more fulfilling.

So I sent that letter to the team and they're all listening to this either upstairs or in here or in the office down the road.

It was the best reaction I've ever had to any letter I've ever sent to my team in terms of fire, emojis and clapping.

Because I explained why and the first principles underneath my belief were about them and it wasn't just we're coming in Tuesday and Wednesday because I'm the CEO and we'll do what I say.

I understand that connection and it's why I've always done this podcast in person even through the pandemic is going out of fashion, but it ain't going out of our sort of Maslovian hierarchy.

Yeah, look, a lot there.

So I spoke at the Wall Street Journal Europe Conference, the piece of content that's gone more viral than almost anything I've ever done, I got just a ton of shit for and pushback.

And I said, they asked me advice to young people and I started off, I said, if you're young, you should never be at home.

Home is for sleep and you should be out.

And professional and romantic success is a function of the amount of time you spend outside of your house.

And so they clipped a young person, you should never be at home, home is for sleep.

And thousands of TikToks with people doing stitches showing themselves making cupcakes or watching Netflix.

And basically, and then they chime in and say, screw you, Scott Gowler, why do we listen to these idiot boomers?

Because they're saying, look, I love home, going out is expensive.

My apartment is so expensive that I want to be at home.

Anyways, the workplace, one in three relationships begin at work.

It's a fantastic place to meet and fall in love.

And because of some abhorrent behavior, it's gotten a bad rat.

And if you're going to have an organization, the number one source of retention for a company comes down to one question.

Do you have a good friend at work?

I go to weddings all the time, but people who met at work.

So, but there's some nuance here.

The first is around remote work.

Remote work is an unbelievable unlock for caregivers.

Now there's people taking care of kids, people taking care of their parents, people trying to take care of themselves,

or quite frankly, don't have the money to live near work.

And so to give them the opportunity to work from home a few or four or the five days a week or five is a big unlock.

And it's something I think we should have a caregiver classification where we try and invest and afford more flexibility.

If you're under the age of 30 or 40, much less 30, the office is a feature, not a bug.

And where we need, though, there's some nuance here.

And that is we need to modulate the kind of tech environment or some of the tech environment where it turned into kind of this Baknalian people,

you know, having sex in the, you know, the coat room and tequila everywhere.

That's probably a little too much.

But in my companies, I've always created on a regular basis a social environment for people to meet.

And most of it's just socializing with mentors and colleagues and making friends.

But sometimes people start the path towards mating.

And that's wonderful.

Because if all of a sudden there is no workplace or you're discouraged because HR would just rather nobody ever have sex at work.

It just solves a lot of problems.

You're taking out a third of the mating opportunities, a third.

And so where are young people supposed to meet?

If you're into work and you want to have influence and you want to do well and you want to develop economic security, so you're working all the time.

And it's remote.

Where on earth are you supposed to meet somebody?

And quite frankly, sometimes some of the most attractive attributes of you to potential romantic partners can be best demonstrated professionally.

Now there's some nuance and I'm on a bunch of public company boards and we deal with this all the time.

I think above a certain level of seniority, your flies up and locked.

It's just not permitted.

But in terms of young people at a similar seniority or they're all junior, my attitude is have at it, meet, fall in love, fall out of love, whatever it might be.

I think that's a wonderful thing and I think community and friendship and meeting people at work.

I have a rule at my company, a property media, and we're only 14 people now.

If any four of them are ever together, they get my credit card.

I mean, they don't have physically have it.

But if the four of you are at a play, a football match, or you decide to go to Tulum, which they have done on a Thursday night or whatever, it's on me.

Because that investment in community and friendship is worth it.

It's a great retention tool and it also is important for culture.

So I think the ability to meet people at work is really important.

You just have some nuance there.

The 50 year old CEO is making millions of bucks a year.

Sorry, boss, off campus.

And when we hear that it was, you thought it was consent, no, you fucked up your out.

We told you this right here.

We told you right from the get go.

And I think it's important to educate people about the nuance of it.

But to tell people, young people that they shouldn't in an intense situation where we tell them to work this hard in a competitive economy, to tell them that they shouldn't form relationships and sometimes lead to romantic relationships.

It's just naive.

And to your point, we've taken away an enormous arena or venue for making those connections, which we're lacking.

So my sense is workplace relationships in 99% of the time are a positive.

They're a feature, not a bug.

I appreciate the nuance as well that you applied to that situation because I don't have children yet.

I have a clear bias that I've realized is there.

And I did play forward the scenario where I have, say I had four or five children now, how I'd have to adjust or how I'd want the companies that I run to adjust to me.

And so I have to kind of reflect that in the companies now because there are people in my teams, even this team that have multiple children.

And I think that's where the importance of that freedom part in the freedom of within parameters thing where, okay, we have a set of guidelines of how we work together that bring us together and for that synchronous collaboration and bonding.

But also we appreciate that if we want to retain our best people, we need to keep them over all of the seasons of life.

We need to be a great place to work through pregnancy, fatherhood, you name it.

Yeah, I could tell when you were saying that it's great to be a young company where no one's had kids yet and the majority of people haven't had kids.

That's not sustainable.

And show me a CEO who is mandated back to office.

I'm going to show you a guy who has someone else taking care of his kids has the money to live near work, right?

Whereas a lot of people don't.

So the back to office mandates have usually been dictated by someone who's in a real position of privilege.

And I'd like to see a new classification of worker called the care worker, where if you're taking care of people, you just are afforded more flexibility.

Also, we need to have an adult conversation.

If you are working remotely, the majority of the time, you're going to make less money.

Getting into work is hard.

It's expensive to cry sacrifice and you get rewarded for it.

If your job can be moved, if you can move to Boulder, Colorado, if your job can be moved to Boulder, it can be moved to Bangalore, be clear.

The CEO of a big conglomerate running the European unit can be more talented than the person running the Americas.

But if headquarters is in the Americas, the CEO of the Americas is much more likely to get the top job, the CEO of the whole company.

In every promotion, there's two or three people or more who are qualified for that promotion.

The person who gets it is a function of the decider.

And the decider is going to pick the person you have the strongest relationship with and relationships are a function of proximity.

So before you collect dogs and kids, get into the office.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be living it for.

And your question was actually left by Daniel Eck.

Oh, Daniel.

I've never told anybody that before, but it's a special occasion.

The question he's left for you is with AI coming in, perhaps replacing many jobs, what parts of humanity will become more important?

And what will matter less?

So first off, I'm an AI optimist.

I think this catastrophizing around AI is narcissism.

Technologists like to believe that their technology is the single point of salvation for humanity or is going to destroy humanity.

It's just narcissism.

I don't think AI is going to save or destroy humanity.

The people who are most valuable are the ones who get out ahead of this technology versus what we did with Big Tech.

We let weaponization of elections, teen depression, polarization, get out ahead of the regulation.

So I think the most important people, this is going to sound lame, are government officials that are thoughtful and say we won't get fooled again and we're going to regulate this technology.

But when the people that are making the technology are actually, it seems to be going to government and saying we need regulation here.

They didn't do that in Web 2 with social networks and stuff, but those people like Sam Altman, even Elon Musk was at the Washington the other day pushing for legislation.

That for me says something.

Yeah, what it says, Stephen, is that they're full of shit because when Sam Altman calls for regulation in front of Congress, this is their go-to.

I can pull up clips of Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg saying we welcome regulation.

This is their go-to.

And keep in mind, these people are massively over consulted by some of the smartest comms people in the world.

Sam Altman says I want regulation.

And I believe Sam.

He's really earnest.

He looks like a young, nice man.

And concurrently, he has lobbyists in Europe trying to suppress regulation against AI.

I mean, this is just such bullshit.

This notion that stopped me before I kill again.

And then they have armies of lawyers and lobbyists and paint the money, paint the towns of DC and Brussels and money to stave off any regulation.

Despite their calls for regulation, there hasn't been a single point of regulation.

And I speak to a lot of senators and elected officials and they just roll their eyes and go, Senator Amy Klobuchar has been trying to pass antitrust regulation to break up big tech.

That would be the easiest way to oxygenate both of our economies would be to take these incredible companies, break them up, and you'd see shareholder growth, growth in jobs, growth in tax base, more startups.

These things have just gotten way too powerful.

But when she has antitrust legislation, while Senator Prashai will say thoughtfully we should look at regulation and we definitely are open to regulation.

We're talking to our partners. That's their go-to.

Meanwhile, there are more full-time lobbyists working and living in Washington, DC than there are sitting U.S. senators.

So this is their go-to. Stop me before I kill again, right?

I want to be regulated. And wouldn't you know not a single pass of regulation has passed.

Is it because government can't get their act together?

Maybe. Or is it because they want to give the public the impression that they're good people such that there's a lack of public uprising.

People love these products.

And our elected officials are just outgunned with some of the best and brightest lawyers and lobbyists who have literally overrun DC and Brussels.

So this whole call or openness to regulation, it's jazz hands. It's a head fake.

But back to the original question, I really hope that some of the best and brightest and young staffers who understand AI get out ahead of this.

And we're going to see the first real externality of AI in Q1 and Q2 of next year.

I believe and I'll go something like the following.

Putin's spending $70 billion and losing tens of thousands of lives every year on a failed invasion of Ukraine.

And he can the fastest way to victory for him is really simple is the election of Donald Trump.

He's won. If Donald Trump is inaugurated in January of 2025, Putin has won the war in Ukraine.

And if I'm Putin, I figured that out pretty quickly.

And instead of sending $70 billion, why wouldn't I just spend $7 billion on troll farms and AI tested information that will create deep fakes that deposition Biden and Harris for 2024?

And I have an amoral management team who despite their calls for regulation and their concerns about the Commonwealth will cash these checks and then post inauguration of a president.

Just feel awful about all the AI generated misinformation that skewed these elections.

So we're about to see a misinformation Lollapalooza in the first half of next year that takes AI, a murderous autocrat that is losing a war in Ukraine and amoral management.

I don't think these are bad people, but when it's raining money, it kind of you decide, well, oh, there's a problem here.

There might be election misinformation.

We can't figure out who's paying for all of this.

We don't want to implement the technology to watermark AI because that would be censorship.

And we're definitely not going to agree to remove our protections from 230 based on AI generated content that's been elevated algorithmically.

No, let's cash their check.

Let's cash their damn check and then we'll revisit what this all means.

So I think aggressive regulatory oversight.

I'm sick of calling on the better angels of CEO.

So I'm sick of for them that waiting to show up.

We live in a capitalist society to make more money is to be more loved, broader selection set of mates, people like you, you can give money away.

So why wouldn't you want to be more loved so you will ignore the externalities of your business?

And to a certain extent, that's what a for profit company is supposed to do.

It's supposed to make as much money as it can within the confines of the law.

So the most important people around AI are our elected leaders who need to get out ahead of this issue as opposed to, you know, realizing that one in eight teenage girls in the UK directly site Instagram is a form of their self esteem problems that often leads to suicidal ideation and self harm.

We need to get we need to get out in front of this one.

So boring the boring important people here are the regulators.

The 62% of people that say they feel lost and directionless though.

I reflect on what Sam Altman is doing with this universal basic income program.

And a few of these very smart AI people speak to universal basic income being the outcome.

We will hand money to people in society because there'll be such little work for people to do.

This is what I hear that will need to support them in some way.

So we'll give them money.

And my worry has always been that as you said, the pursuit, the journey, the victory, the rejection, all of those things being central to our sense of like purpose and forward motion and progress is does that disappear in a world where we're just giving people universal basic income.

The idiocracy vision out of buy into it that we're all just going to be on a couch watching Netflix because there's not a need for for labor anymore.

First off, people don't need work, what they need is purpose.

So a lot of times when people are economically secure and they need purpose, they go to work for nonprofits or they do something that's not economically driving them.

So you can find purpose without work.

But having said that, there's a cadence to all technological innovation and it goes something like this.

There's catastrophizing that it's going to do away with all middle class jobs, automation and the auto industry.

And in the short term, there is some job destruction.

And then, but we couldn't have envisioned heated seats or car stereos and employment goes up because there's new ways to leverage technology.

And I think the same is going to happen with AI.

There's going to be some industries and there's going to be some job destruction.

But the opportunities for new businesses in AI and its intersection with healthcare education, it's going to create a lot of jobs.

Now there'll be some losers and some reshuffling, but I just don't buy.

I think AI is actually going to over the long term, I think it's going to increase employment.

It's just going to make them more productive and higher paid and the people who don't adopt.

AI is not going to take your job.

Someone who understands AI is going to take your job.

But every technology in history has ultimately usually been some job destruction in the short end.

One in three people in America used to make their living in farming.

And so we were worried about all these technologies to increase output.

Guess what? Now it's only one in 25, but employment has gone up.

But we make our money now from what we describe as if you think about both of our careers, like some form of intelligence.

So that's what I think none of those revolutions have taken on human intelligence.

I think they've taken on our muscles and think about the farming example you gave there.

But this feels like the first revolution that's taken the last thing I have, which is my intelligence.

If someone said to me once, some AI expert on this podcast,

just imagine there's someone through that wall there, Steve.

Not only could they, was their intelligence 10,000% or 10,000 times broader than yours,

but they could think a million times faster than you can think.

Who are you?

There's a real arrogance to think that you are going to control it.

Or that you will be able to perform better at it as a podcast or as a author or as a CEO.

Or as an investor.

And that frame, I go, is that going to be a reality that there will be a species or a being or whether it exists on a microchip or whatever.

That is, can think a million times faster than me and is 10,000 times more intelligent than me.

Yes, I go, yes.

In a world of robotics, will that species be able to move around as well? Yes, okay.

Well, it needs to be around not really because everything's connected to the internet anyway.

And I go, so where do I fit in that world?

I understand I'll be good at releasing oxytocin by hugging my dog and my girlfriend.

But beyond that, I go, where do I, even with driving, I think driving is the biggest employer in the world.

It's playing out the scenario where you remove all the drivers from Uber and Lorry drivers and then they pull up at a gas station

and their food is served by speaking to a large language model and then it spits out the back end.

I go, where does, you know, that's been my, it's kind of like a black hole in my head.

I don't really know what comes after that.

Yeah, but we've seen it before.

And so in the US, the largest employer or the most popular or the biggest number of jobs among the non-college educated is truck driver.

Autonomous driving just makes sense for long haul trucking.

I think that's where it's going to start.

And what we've been really bad at in the past is figuring out how to take some of the incremental income created by that increased productivity

in people in terms of retraining or, as you said, just giving them money, but you can't stop it.

I mean, you can, you can hold it at the gates for a little while, but eventually the damn bursts and trying to keep technology in a bottle.

This doesn't, just doesn't work.

But at the same time, I think that autonomous driving over the long term is going to create a lot of jobs.

And because people are going, it's going to free up time to people who understand how to program and repair autonomous vehicles or drive this, you know, figure out the software or the lobbyist trying to convince San Francisco to,

this can be a lot of jobs.

What it comes right down to is it'll be more competitive.

But the people who have those skills are going to make more money.

And then the people who make that money are going to want to have nicer things and houses from people who need to show up.

You can make a lot of money as a welder right now.

And this goes to one of my solutions.

Only 3% of people in the U.S. on LinkedIn, the title is apprentice.

In the U.K. in Germany, it's 11%.

In Germany, 50% of the population has some vocational certification.

In the U.S., it's five.

We need much more, not only vocational training, but we need to stop shaming it.

If you build a house, you're going to see that anyone who has these types of skills actually makes a really good living.

And I don't know if AI is coming for those jobs.

So in the information sector, the communities that have had champagne and cocaine, and it's been disco for 30 years, programmers, services people or lawyers, those people are going to probably get hit disproportionately hard.

But the incremental productivity gains, I mean, productivity isn't everything, but in the long run, it's almost everything.

That's a Paul Krugman post.

This is supposedly going to increase productivity in the U.S. over the next 10 years, 1.2%.

That's probably going to translate to trillions of dollars in incremental value.

So I'm just not, I think this is, I think, again, I'm looking forward to the conversation in 20 years.

I think AI is going to create more jobs and more opportunities than it's going to destroy.

I'm an AI optimist.

You definitely inspired my thinking to be a little bit more optimistic there, because you're right.

Thinking forward, if we were in, I don't know, the industrial revolution, I never would have been able to, I could think about the things we'd lose, but I couldn't think about the things that we'd stand to gain through innovation and disruption and the internet that was to come and all these other things.

It's really hard for us to think about what will exist in the future and the opportunities, but it's really easy for us to think about the things we'll lose within the coming revolution, because I just couldn't just point at them because they're all around me.

But I can't point at things that I've never seen before, if you know what I'm saying.

So thank you.

Scott, thank you again for returning.

The conversation we had last time was so enjoyable for me, but I just, I use my friends, my like, my five friends in my little WhatsApp group as a barometer for the great conversations.

I look at the metrics, of course, the watch time, the retention, all those things, but so many of my really close friends said that he is just brilliant.

Oh, thanks for that. Thanks for saying that.

This is just the truth.

I know the friends that said that.

And it's not just the extent and the depth of knowledge you have.

It's you're a wonderful communicator.

You're hilarious and you're hilarious in the most, almost it seems unintentional, but it's a skill that very few people are blessed with and you're blessed with that skill.

Just telling really interesting stories in such a compelling, funny way that whole people and you don't need to shout and scream to do it, which I think is a real talent that you have.

So thank you for coming back here.

Thank you for moving to the UK.

It means that we can have these conversations more often.

And I'm so excited for your book in March about wealth.

I feel like a lot of people need that.

And even I'm especially excited for your book about masculinity.

I'm so passionate about that subject matter that I almost thought I need to write a book about that.

So knowing you're writing it means that I definitely won't.

Because you'll do a wonderful job.

Well, I know a lot of people, I know a lot, even like Chris Williamson's, I know a lot of these people have told me they're going to write a book about it, which speaks to the need.

I have a friend in my chat actually said to me, because I've got this two book deal with Penguin.

I need a second book.

He was like, I would love someone to write about what it is to be a man these days.

That's going to be a ton of them.

But just let me thank you for the kind words, but just let me say when I'm on the road for more than two or three weeks, first thing I do is I come home and I go see my kids.

I usually get home late at night and I can sometimes and it's sad.

I'll notice they've grown because I haven't seen them in two or three weeks.

I'm like, oh my God, he's actually grown.

I haven't seen you in 13 months.

You have blown up.

I didn't know who you were.

I'm seeing you in airports.

I'm seeing you across media in America.

So I can't tell you, like I peek into the room and I look at you sleeping.

You have grown a foot.

So congratulations.

My sense is you've hit a tipping point.

So congratulations to you and the team.

It just feels like you guys are killing it.

Thank you so much.

I am the face of this operation, but you probably can understand that I wouldn't be able to function without people that would just like me.

And that's exactly what I have.

That's what I have in Jack, who was here from the very jump when we had zero podcasts and nobody knew who we were.

That's what I have in the team, Jemima and all of the broader teams.

So thank you so much.

We're doing our very best to make things better.

And you were actually a huge lift in our success because that first conversation we had did so well with a huge new audience in the United States.

And the momentum has for us continued from there.

So thank you, Scott. Thank you for your time.

Very precious. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.