HOST-- COVID, political extremism, inflation, the
future of our democracy, with so much
coming at us it's hard to take it all in.
Well my dear friends, Scott Galloway
always has a unique way to explain
what's going on and in his new book,
Adrift-America in 100 Charts, he looks at
everything from the size of container
ships, to online dating, to life
expectancy, all to explain America today,
and more importantly, where he thinks
we're headed. Scott is a marketing
professor at NYU and a co-host of the
very successful podcast, Pivot, and I am
thrilled to have him here with us
tonight. Scott, let's talk about this book.
You give us a history lesson, right? 1945
until today. But not through traditional
storytelling, it's all through charts. Why?
To combat misinformation?
GALLOWAY-- Well, it's just
we've had the alphabet for about 1500
years, but we've been interpreting images
on Cave walls or meeting people based on
where the sun was in the sky so we just
absorb pictures six to six 60 times
faster than words, so people just understand a
problem when they see a chart much
faster than when they see words.
HOST -- So you write in the
in the book, that nations prosper or perish based on
how they respond to crisis.
GALLOWAY-- Absolutely.
HOST -- Covid, how do we respond?
GALLOWAY -- We're going to need a bigger boat. I
think it's a mixed bag. First
off it demonstrates what's best and
what's, I think, worst about America right
now. The first is: no one's lining up to
get a Chinese or a Russian vaccine. The
most important product of the last 50
years isn't the iPhone, it isn't the
microprocessor, it's the vaccine. We would
have lost another one to two million
people without these vaccines. We have
the best scientists. We have the best
distribution. But at the same time,
despite the fact that we had these
vaccines, the polarization our society
meant a lot of people unnecessarily
perished and we also have- we politicize
them, we're angry about them, and we don't
celebrate the fact that the brightest
people in the world all want to come
here. We don't celebrate the fact that
these vaccines were essentially
government funded, and whether it's
Moderna, Google or Apple we have a
small group of people, who are the most
fortunate people in our nation, Tech
billionaires, who tend to be the first
ones to sort of criticize the government.
Not acknowledging that every one of
these big companies has built a layer of
innovation on top of middle-class
taxpayer investments that were very
forward-looking.
HOST-- That's where I want you
to go because when you talk about the
greatest innovation, you don't actually
say the vaccine. You don't say the
smartphone or refrigeration. You say our
greatest innovation is the middle class.
Explain this to us.
GALLOWAY -- Well I agree with
Peter Drucker, the economist in the 60s.
The whole point of an economy is to
create a middle class. They fight our
wars. They pay our taxes. They're
responsible for the majority of
society's gains, and to a certain extent
the greatest... You could argue one of the
biggest accomplishments of the last 50
years, is when you... Literally, want to
explain China's relative ascendancy- It's
that they have brought a half a billion
people into the middle class whereas our
middle classes declined. And that's the
bad news. The good news is, just as we've
attacked the middle class, we can
rejuvenate it. There's this illusion of
complexity [propogated by] people who want to
continue to cram more wealth in the top
one percent, or Tech, who claim they can't
solve these complicated problems around
polarization or election misinformation.
We can absolutely undo these problems.
With one small child tax credit we
reduce childhood poverty by 50 percent.
HOST-- And then we got rid of that child tax
credit I might remind our audience.
GALLOWAY-- We struck it. We struck it.
HOST-- Um, but are you being sort of overly
romantic when you think about that that
American middle class of the 1950s and
1960s? Because it was all well and good
for June and Ward Cleaver, but it left
out all sorts of Americans.
GALLOWAY-- Yeah, the heteronormative view that we associate
with the middle class no longer makes
sense, right? Only a quarter of America is
a traditional heteronormative household.
But at the same time a middle-class
household, that has a compact with
America that their kids will do better
than them, always happened, [that compact was always fulfilled]
until the last five years. For the first time in our
history a 30 year old man or woman isn't
doing as well as his or her parents were
at the age of 30. And at the end of the
day, that's the whole shooting match.
That's all we want, Right? Is we want to
be part of a society where we pay taxes,
we work hard, we play by the rules, such
that we can be successful, and more
importantly, our kids can be more
successful than us.
HOST-- Was that the most
distressing chart for you? Because, you...
these charts are like a a tour of doom.
all right and we like to say I just want
to live in a country, I want to create a
world where my kids get to live in a
better, smarter, stronger, place. That chart...
Was that the toughest reality for you to
look at?
GALLOWAY-- No, I think the most upsetting
chart is one that gets a lot of
attention for the wrong reasons. And
that is the Pew. Pew did a study on young
adults, and when you're walking down the
"Avenue that is America" one in three men
under the age of 30 haven't had sex in
the last year. And you hear the term sex
and your brain view...
HOST (interrupting)-- With another person? Because porn has never been
bigger.
GALLOWAY -- Well, that's an entirely different
talk show, and I would acknowledge we're
in the midst of the greatest
unsupervised experiment on young men in
history, and that is porn.
HOST -- 'Cause they're
having sex, it's just not with anyone
else.
GALLOWAY-- And I would argue that it not only
creates unreasonable expectations around
a relationship with a woman but it
decreases their "mojo" to go out and
develop the ... skills to
actually have their own physical
intimate encounters. But going back to
the fact that so many humans are
establishing relationships, sex is the key
component of establishing what is the
elemental foundation of any society. And
that is a long-term loving relationship.
And we are producing too many young men
who aren't attaching to school,
they're not attaching to work, and
they're not attaching to romantic
Partners. The most dangerous person in
the world, Stephanie, is a young, broke, and
alone male and we are producing way too
many of them. And the fact that [of]
kids under the age of 18, 50
percent [fewer] kids are seeing their
friends every day. It's been cut in
half. The fact that in the next five
years there's going to be two female
graduates of college for every one male
graduate. And something we don't
acknowledge on the left is that women
aren't interested in mating with men who
aren't economically viable.
HOST -- But why do we
hate those women? Because when it was
reversed, when it was more men graduating
from college, you didn't see women lining
up to hate them and now those young men
look at those women those successful
women and they look at them with anger,
with with Fury. Where... Explain this one to
me.
GALLOWAY-- So you're absolutely right, uh, and
when these men get isolated they are
more prone to misogynistic content,
they're less likely to believe in
climate change, they're more prone to the
conspiracy theory. The guy who attacked
Salman Rushdie, that wasn't about a
fatwa. That was about a young man living
in his mother's basement. So what I would
argue though, uh, and I get push back
from feminists on this, that I want to be
clear: No one has an obligation to
service men who aren't having sex. When I
was in college the majority of my
friends were having sex with other men.
What I would say though, is unless we
make an investment in young people such
that they're economically viable, and
they can establish relationships, and
part of that is discipline around not
not watching a lot of porn, getting a job,
going to school, [and] taking responsibility
for your own life. But without a viable
class of young men who are doing well... No
group has fallen further faster in our
nation than young men.
HOST-- Do you think this this divisiveness, this
isolation, is worse than it's ever been
before? Or do you think it's just on
display because social media magnifies
it?
GALLOWAY-- Well, it's not just social media. It is
worse. I mean another disturbing chart: 54 percent
of Democrats are worried that their
child is going to marry a Republican. A
third of each party sees the other party
sees the other party as a mortal
enemy. There's a great photographer
colorizing World War II photos and
there's this wonderful photo of these
young men uh with getting off a landing
craft going on to Omaha Beach in
the invasion of Normandy. Two out of
three would make it off that beach.
Average age 26, average salary (inflation
adjusted base) is 800 bucks. I can't
imagine any of them look left or right
and knew that he was a Republican or a
Democrat. We are, geopolitically, probably
stronger than we've ever been. We're food
independent. We're energy independent. The
brightest people in the world want to
come here. There's more people becoming
billionaires, and when they become
billionaires they decide to turn their
company into a non-profit focused on
climate change. [Like] the CEO of Patagonia just
decided. We have never been stronger
relative ...
---A/V FEED INTERRUPTION---
GALLOWAY-- forget and then I think as a
truth is America's greatest allies
will always be other Americans. We need
some sort of Social Service that that
puts people in the company of other
Americans not against people in other
political parties.
HOST-- Okay, well then that
takes me to the chart that stood out to
me, the one on immigrants. Okay, in 2018
more than half of our unicorn companies
here, right? Billion Dollar Plus private
companies were founded or co-founded by
immigrants. Yet we don't even have
immigration policy in this country. How
do you square that?
GALLOWAY-- Oh, we shouldn't...
HOST-- We hate our newest greatest asset?
GALLOWAY-- if the Tampa Bay Buccaneers every year have the
top draft choices across the entire
College environment and they decided no
we don't want the top... We get the number
one draft choice from every nation in
the world every year and we've decided
that we don't want that.
HOST-- Why?
GALLOWAY-- I don't
entirely understand. I think we've
politicized and demonized immigrants. And
if you look at immigrants in our society
they're much more likely to move up the
income ladder. It's very difficult
whether it's Mastercard or Google or
Microsoft you're talking about
immigrants. a third of the NASDAQ is run by
first generation immigrants so that's
the secret sauce. And to turn away number
one draft choices every year just seems
insane to me. it makes absolutely no
sense.
HOST-- So why did you write this book?
because you write about American
exceptionalism, which you celebrate, which
you believe in, but you're down on the
American dream. So what are you trying to
tell us?
GALLOWAY-- Well to use an old Bill Clinton adage, I
don't think there's anything wrong with
America that can't be fixed with with
what's right with it. We have huge
problems. But you have to diagnose the
disease and not go after the tumor. Go
after the disease! We need to identify
that young men are failing, that
polarization is tearing us apart, that
this massive income inequality is not
only unjustified, but all of these things
can be fixed. Big Tech likes to pretend
that, "oh the Internet is just a mirror of
the world, that these problems are
complex," and yet, [when] we take one account down
from Twitter and 30 to 60 percent of
election disinformatio goes away. We can absolutely
solve these problems. The middle
class is an accident of World War II and
it requires investment, but when we make
these forward-leaning investments... when
we have R&D as a function of
infrastructure investment, we're spending
about a tenth of what China is. When we
put men and women into space, when we
decide to research vaccines, when we put
GPS satellites into the air, we have
amazing companies that develop. But
we can't have the CEOs of EV companies
constantly criticizing government and
saying government just needs to get out
of the way. Did he want us to get out of
the way when we gave him a 450 million
dollar loan?
HOST-- Uh-uh [No.]
GALLOWAY-- Is he against all the
charging stations the middle class
taxpayers are going to pay for?
HOST-- No, Sir. We're talking about you, Elon Musk
GALLOWAY-- So, who are the most loyal Americans? Who are
the most patriotic? The one who have
invested the most? Veterans. Who are the
ones most apt to criticize the greatest
organization, the most noble organization
in history, the US government? Our most
fortunate! And that is Young Tech
billionaires. It's time we stopped,
quite frankly, as posting... government and
realize that we are here, the prosperity,
we are here, at the connective tissue, the
thing that connects you and me, is this
wonderful thing called US government.
It's us. And it's been the most
successful investor. It's turned back
fascism. It's fed the poor. 50 of
donations globally come from U.S
philanthropy. And at its time that we
said, "okay, we're Americans and let's
let's show some affinity
and some good will for our connective
tissue and our institutions." And that is the
good people in the US government.
HOST-- the thing that connects you and me is
friendship. We are real friends.
GALLOWAY-- Thank you for saying that.
HOST -- Um you devoted this book, you dedicated
this book to your cousin Andrew, who died
of COVID complications. Why did you
do that?
GALLOWAY-- Uh, you know, that's hard. It's, uh, uh...
Andrew. Thank you for bringing that up, I
wasn't expecting that. My cousin was this
tall strapping handsome kid.
HOST-- [So, like] you but strapping and handsome.
GALLOWAY-- uh, all that yeah, me but much
much more charming and good looking.
And he made some terrible decisions. He
decided not to get vaccinated and
through a series of unfortunate
accidents... I could have created a list of
all of my family members who were most
susceptible to COVID he would be at the
bottom of the list, but a series of bad
decisions... and uh, he ended up on a
ventilator, and crashed and died at the
age of 52, and left a nine-year-old boy
an orphan. *GALLOWAY GASPS WITH GRIEF*
HOST-- Why didn't he get vaccinated?
GALLOWAY-- Um, a series of bad decisions. But also I
think the polarization and
politicization of our media that gives
young people, and a lot of us, the excuse
to think there's "both side-ism" around
science. I think a lot of Americans made
terrible decisions, and a lot of people
unnecessarily died because of the
politicization of everything. And the bad
feelings we have towards each other and
politicizing science and the truth. And until we
have a truth again... It used to be the
Republicans and Democrats came together
around this thing called science. We said
"Okay." We said, "Okay, um
this is what the data says. This is what
the science says." And now we've politicized
science around our political leanings.
And I think it's cost us dearly. Uh,
including the lives of a bunch of people.
So yeah, anyways, [The book is] devoted to Andrew Levine.
HOST-- Well tomorrow is a new day, and Democrats
and Republicans can get together there.
GALLOWAY-- There you go. I hope so. Thank you Stephanie.
HOST-- Thank you so much.
GALLOWAY-- Thank you.
HOST-- I appreciate
it. Scott Galloway, again his new book
"Adrift- America in 100 Charts." Take it
from me, you need to read it.
