Overtime – Episode #714: Scott Galloway, Fareed Zakaria, Josh Barro

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Speaker 4 Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Speaker 2 Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Stan.

Speaker 2 Are we ready to introduce these people now?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Nobody tells me what's going on. All right, he's a marketing professor and author of the best-selling book Notes on Being a Man, Scott Galloway.

Speaker 2 He hosts Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN and is author of Age of Revolutions, Fareed Zakaria.

Speaker 2 And he's a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and host of podcast Central Air, Josh Barrow. Okay.

Speaker 2 If you missed the show itself, Scott is trading on my

Speaker 2 applauding him for telling young men to drink.

Speaker 2 Not to excess, just so you can talk to a girl. Okay.

Speaker 2 It does help get your courage up. I mean, it absolutely does.
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2 Well, we were talking about safetyism before and all the ways that it's hurt things when they think they're doing a good job with making everything

Speaker 2 foolproof, childproof for the world, and nobody ever dies. But you know, there are always some other side to it.
All right, let's get to the people's questions. This week, the U.S.

Speaker 2 Mint pressed its final pennies. Wasn't this long overdue? Yes.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, it costs them more to make a penny than a penny is worth.

Speaker 2 It's amazing it took this long.

Speaker 5 I liked John Lovett's proposal that he wants to have 10, 20, and 50 cent coins, and then we can get rid of the whole second decimal place.

Speaker 5 Prices will just be in a tenth of a dollar instead of a hundredth.

Speaker 2 John Lovitts from Saturday Night Live?

Speaker 5 No, John Lovitt Lovett from like Potshead.

Speaker 2 They should team up.

Speaker 2 It's what a recording.

Speaker 2 The famous philosopher. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And what does Caratop say about it?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 yes, of course. I mean, it's amazing that I used to do this as an example of how the government, once a program starts, no matter what it is, MoHab subsidies, whatever, COVID, some some COVID stuff.

Speaker 2 You remember the Mohair subsidies is an amazing one because it was started in World War II because Mohair is what you used for Army uniforms. I think it finally got repealed in 2010.
Oh, it did?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so World War II ended 1945, as I recall. I mean,

Speaker 2 speaking of that, I mean, our healthcare system is really based on World War II era thinking about health care. Remember, they couldn't pay people for some reason, and so they paid them in healthcare.

Speaker 2 That's how we got this employer-based system.

Speaker 2 It doesn't have to be that way.

Speaker 5 It wasn't even really thinking, it was that they set wage controls to try to get to stop inflation from getting out of control during the war, and so companies to get around them started giving people health insurance as a benefit because they couldn't actually raise their wages.

Speaker 5 So it was like a kudge.

Speaker 2 So good. And then it evolved into our whole system.
Good riddance to the pen.

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Speaker 5 Here's another one.

Speaker 2 Should we eliminate daylight savings time? That's a perfect follow-up question because it's another bullshit thing

Speaker 2 based on

Speaker 5 people love to complain about this, but they're really just mad that there's less daylight in the winter. Yes.

Speaker 2 That's why we're mad.

Speaker 5 Right, but the government, they can't change the axial tilt of the Earth.

Speaker 2 What daylight savings time does it? No, no, but we couldn't. We make it worse.

Speaker 5 No, no, we make it better because if you don't change the clocks, then you waste a bunch of time. Like the sun will rise at 4.30 in the morning in the summer, and people are asleep.

Speaker 5 They don't get to enjoy the daylight. This way, most people get to wake up approximately a little bit after the sun comes up, and then they can enjoy as much daylight as is available in the day.

Speaker 5 And the reason, you know, we fight over this all the time. The Nixon administration did this.
They got rid of daylight saving time.

Speaker 5 And what they found was that people were really angry because they were waking up,

Speaker 5 they kept it on daylight saving time. So it was like in the winter, the sunrise was really late, and people were really mad.
They were like, oh, my kid has to walk to school in the dark now.

Speaker 5 And it was supposed to be a two-year experiment. They ended it early because people got so mad they brought it back to the system that we have.

Speaker 5 And so, you know, people will just complain about anything. They're always mad that it's dark in the winter.
But they'll complain even more if

Speaker 5 you actually change.

Speaker 2 We all get paid to have opinions on everything. I have no opinion on this.

Speaker 2 I do.

Speaker 2 The daylight savings experts in America can have it out.

Speaker 2 I'll accept whatever they are. I guess I'm pissed off because I don't live on this schedule.
That's why.

Speaker 5 Brent, when do you wake up?

Speaker 2 Closer to noon than dawn.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I'm up here. All All right.

Speaker 2 This is for you, Scott. Does the sports gambling scandal reflect a larger societal problem?

Speaker 2 I guess they mean that both in basketball now and in baseball, we've had two scandals where the players were in on it. That hasn't happened in a while.
Does this reflect a larger societal problem?

Speaker 6 Yeah, you could argue that the most profitable companies in the world tap into a flaw in our instincts.

Speaker 6 And since we came off the savannah, absence of salty, sugary, fatty foods, absence of mating opportunities, and absence of free play and gaming.

Speaker 6 So we've become addicted to trans fats, addicted to porn, addicted to gambling apps because we're not used to the institutional production.

Speaker 6 Our instincts haven't caught up to the institutional production. Gambling is probably a real, unfortunately, another thing that's tapping into a pretty immature male brain that wants more DOPA hits.

Speaker 6 One out of two college-age males bet on the Super Bowl.

Speaker 6 And you're going to see probably the biggest IPOs of next year will be Calcium Polymarket because now now they're trying to pretend that it's not gambling if you're betting on a mayoral race.

Speaker 6 The reality is when you legalize gambling in a state, you see bankruptcies go up 30%.

Speaker 6 And this is not investing. It's essentially, again, putting Vegas in people's pockets.
And it's going to have really negative externalities.

Speaker 6 I'm not entirely sure what you do about it because you don't need to want to infantilize people. But

Speaker 6 you need to educate young men. to be clear.
You're not investing. You're gambling.

Speaker 6 And the only reason these companies are going to have the biggest IPOs of the next year is because over the medium and the long term, it's impossible to lose. So have a good time, have at it.

Speaker 6 I love Vegas, but be clear, you're going to lose all your money.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 they say that these

Speaker 2 GLPs actually decrease your desire for gambling. Have you found that? You're less.
GLPs, that's Ozempic? That's Ozempic and Wagobi.

Speaker 5 I have not, I mean, I'm not a huge gambler. I'll go to Vegas.
I'll play some craps. I'll play poker.
It hasn't changed my desires around that.

Speaker 5 But I think that, you know, the crazy thing with these scandals is they're not even betting on the games. They're betting on things like, will the next pitch be faster than 97 miles an hour? Right.

Speaker 5 So you can bet on every pitch. Every pitch.
And that means that if you're a pitcher, you can just, all you have to do is flub one pitch.

Speaker 5 You don't have to have to conspire with the rest of your team to lose the game. So

Speaker 5 I think legalizing sports gambling has not gone great. I would be happy to see us go back to the old system.

Speaker 5 But one other thing they could do is they could prohibit some of these proposition bets that are especially vulnerable to these kinds of scandals and then also go to this kind of degenerate behavior.

Speaker 5 It's like, why do you have to bet on every individual pitch? Can't you watch the baseball game and maybe just bet on who's going to win the game?

Speaker 2 Or just enjoy the game.

Speaker 2 But I wonder, I mean, of course I agree with you. I wonder once technology has been unleashed and you can do all this,

Speaker 2 you know, people, if you ban it in America, won't they just set it up in the Cayman Islands and then you do it through there?

Speaker 5 Well I mean I think the other thing we're seeing is it's pretty easy to catch the people who do these schemes. A lot of these pro athletes are not that bright.

Speaker 5 And like if there's like a whole bunch of huge bets on random actions of some not especially famous player,

Speaker 5 it's easy if

Speaker 5 you get a leaked copy of the earnings report and you buy a ton of options three hours before it comes out, the SEC will catch you.

Speaker 5 Sort of similar stuff here, where some people will just go to the airport.

Speaker 2 Unless you're a congressman. That's the girl.

Speaker 2 What is the panel's reaction to the turmoil at the BBC over how they edited Trump's January 6th comments. Well, they did do him dirty.
There's no doubt about it.

Speaker 2 They purposely put together something to make it look

Speaker 2 like he didn't say what he said.

Speaker 2 But the tragedy is what he said was bad enough. Why did you have to doctor him? I mean, I don't understand it.

Speaker 2 Well, you know.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 that one to me was never a smoking gun. Now, do I think he should have handled January 6th differently? Very much so, I do.

Speaker 2 But it was always, but you can pull out the thing where he says peaceful protests. He uses the word peaceful.
It was always murky. To me, the crime was always simply never conceding the election.

Speaker 2 And calling up the Georgia Secretary of State and saying, find me 11,000 votes. But that wasn't that day.
And waiting for like three hours to try to call the mob off.

Speaker 2 Right. But I'm talking about from the whole time the election was over.
Until this very moment, he still hasn't done it. When you don't concede elections, yes,

Speaker 2 they're not going to be able to do that. My point is there's plenty of stuff that he's done that you just have to list, as you just did.
You don't need to make stuff up. You don't need AI for this.

Speaker 6 Traditional media does a better job of factoring it. Don't we hold them to an entirely different standard?

Speaker 6 Fox News knows that they're spreading misinformation about voting machines being weaponized by Hugo Chavez. They knew it was a lie.
They continue to promote that misinformation.

Speaker 6 They get fined three-quarters of a billion dollars. What happened on Fox was a dumpster fire compared to the nuclear mushroom cloud that happens every three minutes on social media.

Speaker 6 Two-thirds of Americans get their news from social media, and yet they are held to absolutely no standards. And when the BBC fucks up, we are hairs on fire.

Speaker 6 Why on earth are we not applying anything resembling the same standards for algorithmically elevated content to these quote-unquote nascent platforms?

Speaker 6 I get that the BBC screwed up, but by that standard, where we're getting two-thirds of our news screws up about a million times a second.

Speaker 6 There's a double standard here. We need to make big tech and where people get their news a fraction as accountable as we want to hold the BBC or CNN or Time Warner.
A double standard. It needs to end.

Speaker 2 Here's one for you. What is the arc of happiness in life? Oh, that's in your book.

Speaker 2 It's very strange.

Speaker 2 Why are the ages of 20, you said, and again, I'm not the typical one, I guess, because I don't get up when people get up. And this is exactly the opposite of my thing.

Speaker 2 But I remember reading it in your book, and what you say is the arc of happiness is people tend to be pretty happy until about 25,

Speaker 2 and then from 25 to 45 are the difficult years.

Speaker 2 And then you get a little happier again later. I mean,

Speaker 2 I hated up until 25.

Speaker 2 And then it got good.

Speaker 6 That's unusual. So

Speaker 2 hold on.

Speaker 2 Hold on. I don't think it's bad on you.

Speaker 2 But it's pretty good.

Speaker 6 Well, okay, across ethnicities, income groups, and cultures, the research is really clean. If you, across an age spectrum, happiness is a smile.
Zero to 25 is prom, Star Wars, making out.

Speaker 6 It's pretty good. Generally speaking, it's pretty good.

Speaker 2 I didn't go to prom. 25

Speaker 6 to 45 is what I call the shit gets real part of your life. And that is regardless of what university or your parents told you, you're not going to be a senator or have a fragrance named after you.

Speaker 6 Having kids is difficult, economic strain. Someone you love a great deal and loves you gets sick and dies.
That's really good.

Speaker 2 Shit gets good.

Speaker 2 But then... Shit gets good, Era.

Speaker 6 Then something wonderful happens.

Speaker 2 No kids.

Speaker 6 About the time you hit your 50s, earlier if you're soulful, you recognize the finite nature of life, you have friends, maybe a little bit of economic security, and you start finding joy in unusual places.

Speaker 6 You start finding, like, I find Bougainville fascinating now. I just would have never thought that.

Speaker 6 And so the lesson is the following.

Speaker 2 That's a very weird side.

Speaker 2 The lesson. Are you sure I didn't do it right?

Speaker 6 The lesson is straightforward.

Speaker 6 If you're 30 years old and you're struggling and your relationships are stressful and you have some economic stress and you think, this is just harder than I thought, that's exactly where you should be.

Speaker 6 And what I would say is keep on, keeping on. Happiness waits for you.

Speaker 2 To me, the bottom line,

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 I have

Speaker 2 your next book, Bill. Your next book is going to be How I Broke All of Scott Galloway's Views and I'm

Speaker 2 Rich I'm Happy as Hell. Well, I got to say, I mean, what you're really saying, bottom line, is that the unhappy years are the years when you have kids.

Speaker 2 But it's true.

Speaker 2 Wait, I know that,

Speaker 2 but, and And I've said this before, like, I have never had kids, so I can't speak first person.

Speaker 2 But unless there's a giant conspiracy going on in this country, where every TV show, every movie, every person who talks about it on talk shows

Speaker 2 presents it as a total fucking nightmare.

Speaker 2 Unless this is some giant conspiracy. I heard some lady on some show the other day talking about it.
I just, I have never, she says, I never have one moment of peace to myself.

Speaker 2 I wish I could have just one hour where I wasn't packing lunches or doing this or doing that. And I just want to say to her,

Speaker 2 you did this to yourselves.

Speaker 2 You did.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 my parents did not feel this obligation to be on me all the time and to make every moment of my life their concern.

Speaker 2 Look,

Speaker 6 to be fair, there is some research showing that people are actually less happy who have kids than those that don't.

Speaker 6 What I would say though,

Speaker 6 what I would say though is that one, I find with my kids they're getting less awful every day.

Speaker 2 And two, that's a vote of confidence.

Speaker 2 Hold on. Are they going to watch this?

Speaker 6 But if we're going to get spiritual about this, there are moments where I think that you feel most purposeful, and think maybe I'm here for a reason. when you're in the company of your kids.

Speaker 6 And I'm sure that's true. That you feel like the opportunity to raise patriotic, loving

Speaker 6 men or women with someone else, I do think that checks an instinctual box that at least I've had a difficult time replicating anywhere. When I was in your shoes, it was always more.
I want more money.

Speaker 6 I want more relevance. I want more dates.
I want more amazing experiences. I was never stated.
The only time I ever...

Speaker 6 The only time I ever feel stated is occasionally when I'm in the company of my kids and I feel like they're safe. So anyways, as I've said before on the show, have kids.

Speaker 6 It's the best thing you'll ever do to ruin your life.

Speaker 2 Amen.

Speaker 2 All right. Thank you very much for your buddies.

Speaker 4 Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.
For more information, log on to HBO.com.