And, This is Who Actually Raises Our Young Men With Scott Galloway

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In 2020, Donald Trump won roughly 41% of the vote with young men. In 2024, he increased that share to 56%.
What's happening with young men in this country? What's happening with the trend lines that define some of the stresses and the anxieties that so many young men are facing in America today? This is Gavin Newsom. And this is Scott Galloway.
Well, Scott, thanks so much for taking the time and joining us on the podcast. And there's so many things I want to talk about from higher education to, you know, a little bit touch on housing, issues of inequality, a lot of the work that you've been doing, talk about some of the trend lines, particularly as relates to young men.
But there's a lot of attention now being placed once again on tech titans, notably Mark Zuckerberg, who you once described lovingly as the most dangerous man in the world, who is now testifying in an antitrust suit. He'll be joined in a number of months by a number of other companies.
I think there are five lawsuits, the FTC. But Mark is up there, one of perhaps the most consequential in decades antitrust discussions related to WhatsApp and Instagram.
Just curious, you're over under, what do you make of this moment? What do you make of Zuckerberg's outreach to the Trump administration to try to get this thing off the docket? The fact they didn't move on it. What does it mean to you from a political perspective, not just from a substantive perspective in terms of the future of tech? First, I think you have to give Mark Zuckerberg as two.
I think he's one of the most brilliant business people of the last 50 years. I also think there's few people that have done more damage while making more money than Mark Zuckerberg.

The coarseness of our discourse, teen depression.

If any company could reverse engineer their product to an uptick in self-harm among teen girls, that company would be put out of business.

And as it relates to antitrust, the concentration of power, power corrupts, absolute power absolutely corrupts. And we have one company that controls 50% of e-commerce, Amazon, one company controls 90% of search, Google, and one company owns two-thirds of social media globally, with the exception of China.
Two out of three people are on a meta platform every day. And unfortunately, I'm in the field of brand strategy.
I taught that. I studied that at Berkeley, teach at NYU.
From 1945 to 1995, we thought we discovered the ultimate sell or selling tool, and that was its sex sells. Tell people to be hotter and play volleyball and be more attractive to potential mates if they buy a Maserati or drink Coors Light.
But these algorithms figured out with Google that there's something that sells even more than sucks, and that's rage. And that is if you bring on somebody who says an mRNA vaccine alters your DNA, that person, in my view, deserves the right to say that.
The dissenter's voice is important. But what these algorithms have figured out is that if we elevate that content beyond its natural organic reach, it creates enragement because people will weigh in and go, that's nonsense and that's not true and you're going to see a surge in measles and rubella.
And then people weigh back in. And every comment, enragement equals engagement equals more Nissan ads equals more shareholder value.
And so unfortunately, the deepest pocketed companies in the world are trying to enrage us or addict us, get us addicted to our phones such that they can then hand us over dopamine addicts to the pharmaceutical and medical industrial complex. Now, how do you address that? We need more laws.
We need to remove 230 for algorithmically elevated content. We need age gating.
There's no reason anyone under the age of 16 should be on Instagram. But also, the more boring stuff, we need to break up these companies.
And in a breakup, it almost always works economically. It works for shareholders.
The seven baby bills that AT&T was broken up into are all worth more than AT&T within seven years. PayPal is worth monstrously more than the original eBay.
Breakups are very accretive to the economy. They're good for employees because they get to charge more to rent their labor.
If you want to be in social media and you're a hotshot engineer, how many companies are really bidding on your talent? I would argue Snap and Pinterest that Facebook could put them out of business, but they don't just to pretend they have competition. They could put them out of business, I think, in 90 days if they targeted their sites on them.
Shareholders win, consumers win. And what happens at this level of concentration is rents go up.
And unfortunately, these companies have non-economic rents. And that is, it's hard to determine the pricing on a product that's free.
But what I would argue is one of the greatest increase in rents in history is the rents, the increase in rents that parents are paying at the hands of an organization that really doesn't have your kid's welfare and best interests. I know you have kids, I have kids.
I would say between 40 and 60% of all real tension or agita in my house, not only between my kids, but between my kids and their mother is around the phone and social media. So look at the rents we're paying here.
I'm cynical anything's going to happen. They've been much more masterful than our government at figuring out a way to avoid all regulation.
Did you, were you surprised, I mean, with all the outreach, particularly for Meta, but I mean, all these guys, you know, not just being there at the inaugural for Trump, but obviously more outreach in the Oval, that you surprised Trump didn't intervene a little more aggressively with the quote-unquote new FTC and then went to trial? I'm convinced, Governor, that 498 of the Fortune 500 CEOs wake up every morning and say, good morning, Mr. President.
I think all of these guys think there's a non-zero probability they're going to be drafted to be president. And the key attribute to be president is leadership.
And I think of leadership. We teach leadership at business school, and I can summarize the entire course of the following.
Do the right thing even when it's really hard. But we want to charge them $7,000 so we can hire formerly important people.
And in my opinion, we shouldn't have leadership or ethics classes, but that's an entirely different talk show. How many corporate CEOs are really stepping up here and saying the greatest own goal in history are these tariffs and they make no sense? There's been such a lack of leadership from these CEOs stepping up.
The FDC and the DOJ, I would argue, have been neutered. Jonathan Cantor, I just interviewed, said that I'm not giving the current officials at the DOJ enough credit that they will break him up.
And that Trump has been kind of a little bit all over the map on this. He didn't like TikTok until he found out.
And then I think the CCP dialed up the algorithm in his favor. So he decided he liked it.
Then he found out that Jeffrey Yass is a large shareholder who gave him $120 million. And what do you know? He no longer wants to ban it.
So I find, unfortunately, our government has become, at this point, especially this administration, and I think Democrats have been guilty of this, but just in a small ball kind of way or a more elegant way, I think it's just pure pay for play. And whether it's Apple, which gives a million bucks to the inaugural committee, and it has a cult of iOS users that he does not want to piss off.
You just saw tariff relief for Apple. Meanwhile, 98% of companies dependent upon the export and import economy are small and medium-sized businesses.
So what do they do? It's great to be Apple, but what do you do if you're not the largest market cap company in the world, and you're just company selling pots and pans importing from China? I talked to a homeware retailer over the weekend, $100 million in product on ships that are going to have to be offloaded to Port of Long Beach over the course of the next three weeks. This person has to show up with another $145 million in tariffs to get this stuff off the boat.
in addition he's going to have to send down hundreds of people to re-tag and re-label because now labels and pricing are attached to the factory in China. And he doesn't know how to plan his business.
So he's stopping hiring. He's not recruiting at universities.
His earnings calls are going to be a mess. So what do we have? A reduction in hiring, a reduction in prosperity with increased consumer prices, and a brand that is America now, toxic uncertainty, where we're seeing people selling our bonds, where people are divesting from our stocks.
But I'm very disappointed that a lot of what I think great leaders in the corporate world aren't stepping up and calling this for what it is. And that is a totally self-inflicted entry, probably the greatest own goal since our entry into Iraq.
But Scott, I mean, they're not doing it for obvious reasons, right? Just pure self-interest, right? And would you argue fiduciary interest on behalf of the shareholders? I mean, I'm with you a thousand percent, but in a world that we're living in, I mean, is it surprising or is it just outraging? I think you bring up the correct point, and that is the smart thing to do from a shareholder perspective. I mean, the thing that disappoints me, governor, president, company excluded, is not that our government officials, and I'm going to be provocative here because you've had a lot of right wing people.
It's not that our government, our elected representatives in D.C. are whores, it's that they're such cheap whores.
And that is, it's the best ROI is to give a million dollars to the inaugural committee and stay up for the crosshairs. So cheap.
So when you're running a $3 trillion market cap company, why on earth wouldn't you just grin and bear it and text me and my co-host that I hate being here, but meanwhile, they show up, they prostitute themselves, they get paraded around. Because if you're solely focused on shareholder value, I get it.
They're just being fiduciaries of the share. Stay out of his crosshairs.
Bend the knee if you're a law firm, refusing to take clients of his adversaries, which is literally an attack on our constitution. Fine, I get it.
But for God's sakes, let's give up the charade about stakeholders. I've been on a bunch of corporate boards and everyone's always talking about stakeholders.
I'm like, okay, let's stop it. In sum, what you should expect or not expect, the American corporation is better making money than any corporation in the world and therefore should not be trusted to do anything else.
We need laws. And we keep hoping that if we shame Mark Zuckerberg and talk about all these kids self-harming and all the damage he's doing, that his better angels are going to show up.
That's just not going to happen. The incentives in America are the following.
To be rich in America is to be loved. It's a loving, generous place if you have money.
It's a rapacious, violent place if you don't. So, so many incentives are to do whatever incremental decisions you have to make to make more money that unless we have systemic laws that say, if you algorithmically elevated content that shows a 14-year-old girl images on suicide, pills, nooses, razors, and this happened because the algorithms pick up she's having suicidal ideation.
Unless we put someone in jail or we fine them $5.50 billion, not $5 billion, they're going to continue to do this. Right now, the incentives are the following.
If you had a parking meter in front of your house that costs $100 an hour, but the ticket was 25 cents, you'd break the law. And that's essentially the incentive system we have around big tech right now.
But for God's sake, stop, stop, the CEO should stop with this BS around stakeholders. They're there for shareholders, admit it, and we can just get on with figuring out we need laws, not to shame them in front of the populace for a TikTok moment.
So you can raise more money as an elected representative, and then the wheel turns, if you will. I appreciate it.
Now, TikTok, I mean, you're just, I mean, you are firmly in the camp that they need to be banned in the United States. Is that right? Well, okay.
So October 7th happens. Since then, there's been 52 pro-Hamas videos for every pro-Israel video.
And I recognize that young people have a healthy distrust of people my age and are maybe more progressive and have a lot of warranted empathy for the people in Gaza. But 52 to 1, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars on psyops to support our message overseas with what you would call Radio Europe or Air America, whatever it might be.
That's propaganda. TikTok now has greater dominance in terms of time.
The average 14-year-old male in America spends 17 hours a week on TikTok, meaning that if you include sleep, they're spending a full day a week on TikTok. They have a greater command of attention among people under the age of 25 than CBS, NBC, and ABC had in the 60s.
Would we have been down in the 60s with the Kremlin owning those three networks? And the argument I would make, Governor, is they would be stupid not to be doing this. They can't beat us militarily.
They can't beat us kinetically. They can't beat us economically.
I know. Let's get them to hate each other.
And I think that's what we're doing. So we're raising a generation of civic, nonprofit, and military leaders that just don't like each other.
They don't like America. Half the people our age, Governor, feel good about America.
It's one in 10 young people. So we weren't comfortable with having missiles pointed at us 60 miles off our shore in Cuba.
I don't understand why we would have a neural jack implanted to all of our use wet matter controlled by the CCP that has a strategic imperative in diminishing our power. I think it's insane that we would allow TikTok into the United States.
And as a point you make often is name how many American tech companies are operating in mainland China. Well, just talking about tariffs, tariffs can be used.
Tariffs do play a role. And that is you can protect nascent industries.
South Korea has done a good job thoughtfully protecting some industries there. If we feel we need a certain level of domestic steel production in case we have a war and need to build tanks, maybe it makes some sense to have tariffs there.
When you have leverage, we had leverage in the truck market. We imposed a 25% tariff on Japan.
They imposed 0%. So they can be used strategically and thoughtfully.
And one type of tariff to restore trade asymmetry is to say, if you're not going to allow a single American media company in a mainland China, it would make sense we're not going to allow any of yours. But we do for some reason, because again, General Atlantic Partners, Sequoia Capital, there are a lot of American investors that are investors in TikTok.
But I just think this is, I think Americans' core competence or one of our key attributes is our optimism. But the Achilles heel of that is I think we're a little bit naive.
And it bothered me that the Biden administration, no one was allowed to be on TikTok for security reasons, because I don't think they realize what's going on here. And you don't, I mean, I apologize for being a little bit all over the place, but have you seen the program Adolescence, Governor? I didn't have the guts.
I started, I kid you not, as a parent, I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it.
My wife watched it. She said, I'm glad you missed it.
Even though she says, you're going to watch it with me. It has to be seen.
It was perfectly powerful beyond words. Yeah.
It's funny you say that. I found, I did watch it because I think a lot about these issues.
I found I had to have a drink before I watched it. It was so rattling.
And the question it augers is, who's raising our kids? And are you raising your kids or is the internet raising your kids? And if the internet's raising your kids, who is raising them? And I'm just not down with a CCP-controlled algorithm raising American children. Time is precious, and so are our pets.
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Let me ask you this. I mean, in terms of just, and we'll get to America's children.
And I think it's interesting, just so much of your work is not just about headlines, but it's about these trend lines. And you, of course, did that wonderful book, Adrift, that did it in charts.
And you've been talking about these broader issues and goes back to my opening a little bit as it relates to inequality and generational theft, as you've referred to it, the issues of housing costs. But you have a, you have sort of a plan, a flag in history here in California.
You grew up in Los Angeles and not only are you a proud graduate of UCLA, we're a proud beneficiary of your largesse. And as someone that's on the UC Regents, thank you.
If you haven't been formally thanked for your incredible personal contributions to UCLA and to UC Berkeley, you've paid forward. You've paid back 20 times X.
But talk to me a little bit about these trend lines you've seen exacerbated, perhaps, by these algorithms that have really led to the headlines and the anxiety that we're all experiencing today. Well, thanks for that.
That means a lot coming from you. Look, I was an unremarkable kid, and I'm not the son of Hummelbrock.
I was remarkably unremarkable. I was raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died a secretary.
Our household income was never over $38,000. I applied to UCLA when the acceptance rate was 76%, and I was one of the 24% that didn't get in.
And I was installing shelving, and the highlight of my day is I'd get ridiculously fucking high with my coworkers and then take to the highways of Ontario, California. And I came home, and I just broke down with my mom.
And I said, is this my life? And there's nothing wrong with vocational work, but I'd really hope to go to college. And we found out there was an appeal process.
And I appealed and I remember it changed my life. The guy, the admissions director called or the guy in the admissions officer called and said, you're not qualified, but you're a native son of California and we're going to give you a shot.
And I rewarded UCLA with a 2.27 GPA undergraduate. I did nothing but learn how to make bongs out of household items and watch Planet of the Apes.
And what did Berkeley do? One of the top 10 business schools in the world? They led me into graduate school with a 2.27 GPA. And I got my shit together.
My mom got sick. I just grew up, like to to think i started becoming a man and it started an upward spiral of prosperity and i've been able to give back and the lesson here is that no one can predict greatness at the age of 18 in anybody no institution and it's higher education is my industry about identifying rich kids are the freakishly remarkable and turning them into billionaires or it about giving the bottom 90 a shot at being in the top and we used to love americans and i look back on the things that that gave me just this unbelievable american experience and some of them don't exist today ucla's admissions rate has gone from 76% to 9%.
They couldn't have let me in.

They didn't have the bandwidth. I spent $7,000 over seven years, undergrad and grad.
That's

total tuition. It's obviously a lot more.
I talk about this very openly. There were also

things today that I think I would have succumbed to that would have gotten in the way of my

prosperity. My mom, when she was 47, when I was a senior in high school, became pregnant and had access to family planning.
Had we lived in a southern state, given our income and our lack of sophistication, I would have dropped out of school to help my mom, and I wouldn't have been able to go to college. Quite frankly, young men are being targeted by the deepest pocketed, most talented organizations in the world, specifically big tech, want to give them the sense that they can have a reasonable facsimile of life on a screen with an algorithm.
Why go out and try and make friends when you have Reddit and Discord? Why go through the pain of putting on a tie, showing up on time, not partying during the week, and get a real job when you can trade stocks or crypto on Coinbase or Robinhood, which usually leads to disaster? Why go through the humiliation, the effort, the rejection, showering for God's sakes, working out, having a plan, showing resilience, approaching a stranger and expressing romantic interest when you have porn. The scariest stat I've seen is that 51% of American men age 18 to 24 have never asked a woman out in person.
So I think the America today- Scott, by the way, just because I can't help it, I got two young women behind the camera, literally both shook

their head when you said that. Oh, really? Forgive me.
I mean, they literally, and now they're laughing, but nervously. I mean, that was very powerful stat you just gave, and it was powerful, their response.
Well, look, I think a lot about masculinity in America, And the reality is, back in the 80s, you know, America loved unremarkable people. And it feels as if America has fallen out of love with the unremarkable.
That the objective of higher ed in America is to try and identify a super class and turn them into billionaires instead of giving the bottom 99 a chance to be millionaires and to find someone, fall in love, have kids, all the profound shit. right? And I worry that young men who are especially susceptible to these algorithms are kind of losing, they've lost a lot of on-ramps into the middle class,

and we aren't producing enough economically and emotionally viable men and who wants more economically and emotionally viable men women uh 30 60 percent of 30 year olds used to have a kid in the household now it's 27 i coach a lot of young men and i think between these algorithms the lack of jobs Quite frankly, they're just not their prefrontal cortex isn't developing. They're less mature 70% of high school valedictorians are girls Women own more homes in single women than men now in urban centers under the age of 30 women are making more money and by the way That is a collective victory.
They deserve it. They're working harder.
They're studying harder. They got their shit together.
They deserve more money. The problem is that without women, to have an honest conversation around household formation and mating, we have to have an honest conversation.
And that is women tend to mate socioeconomically horizontally and up, men horizontally and down. And so when the pool, the viable pool of male mates that's horizontal and up keeps shrinking, there's a lack of household formation.
And what's interesting is that women without a relationship oftentimes pour that additional energy into their friend network and into work. When men under the age of 30 don't have a relationship, they oftentimes pour that energy into video games, porn and sequestering from society, conspiracy theory.
They start blaming women for their problems. They become much more prone to misogynistic content.
They start blaming immigrants for their lack of economic viability. They become very nationalist.
And some, they turn into really shitty citizens. And if a man doesn't have a relationship by the time, if he's never cohabitated or been

married by the time he's 30, there's a one in three chance he's going to be a substance abuser. And some, women used to need relationships for financial support.
They no longer need it. Men have always needed relationships for emotional support.
And without that emotional support, they kind of come off the tracks. And I'm not suggesting in any way women lower their standards.
What I'm suggesting is men need to level up. And we also need to recognize that unless we give more money to young people who are 24% less wealthier than they were 40 years ago, and old people are 72% wealthier, unless we level up all young people and create more opportunities for people to meet, to fall love and to do what i think is the most profoundly rewarding thing and that is raise children with someone you care about and have a reasonable chance of having a home and not having being one of the 40 of households that have medical or dental debt then what is all of this for there's been more shareholder value created in a 10 mile radius of radius of SFO International Airport in the last three years than created in Europe in the last 30 years, but we can't afford to give people a middle-class lifestyle.
I think all of these things are conscious choices we've made, but going back to this notion, I had the opportunity to meet people. I had the opportunity to get jobs.
I had the opportunity to get jobs i had the opportunity to get a cheap education i had the opportunity when i bought that house in san francisco when i graduated from berkeley it was a hundred thousand dollars average comp average house in san francisco cost 280 000 now the comp out of haas is 200 great money but the average house costs 2.1 million so it's gone from 2.8 to 10 times. Minimum wage is stuck at $7.25.
The NASDAQ has gone up sevenfold. Minimum wage has gone up 0%.
Every year, we transfer $1. trillion from people under the age of 65 to the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet to Social Security recipients.
And I'm not suggesting we do away with Social Security, but Governor, neither you nor me should ever get social security. So I feel as if we've consciously transferred money from the young to the old, made it more competitive.
Women are thriving, that's outstanding, but young men are struggling. And I think we're finally having a productive dialogue because the people who are finally, not finally, the people that are most supportive of my work now, it's changed totally, are mothers.
And what they realize is that the nation and women aren't going to continue to flourish as long as men are flailing. And our young men are failing, Governor.
Four times as likely to kill themselves, three times as likely to be addicted, 12 times as likely to be incarcerated. Do we have an opiate crisis? Do we have a homeless crisis? Yes.
But we really have a male opiate and homeless crisis. And if any other special interest group was killing themselves at four times the rate as the control group, we would weigh in with programs.
But instead, because of our generation where so much was prosperity was crammed into a small number of people, specifically white heterosexual males, we want to punish the 19-year-old male for our blessings. And understandably, there's a gag reflex because we've had a 3,000-year head start, but the 19-year-old man whose mom's addicted to opiates, his father's incarcerated, who has no on-ramps into a middle class, I mean, do you really want them to pay the price for the benefit and the privilege that the two of us have received? There's a lack of empathy.
And this is not a zero-sum game. Civil rights didn't hurt white people.
Gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage. If we level up our young people, it's not going to take away from the incredible progress women have made.
Scott, when did you start to really see this trend? When did you start, I mean, your work on

this, your new and a new book on notes on being a man and obviously talking a lot about it. I'm

personally been very attached to this issue. My wife has done a number of documentaries,

one on the myths and underrepresentation of women and girls.

10 years ago, right? Yeah, 10 years, but then immediately did one called The Mask You Live and about masculinity. And this was pre-Trump.
And she really, to your point, she came at it as a parent and the challenges and the difference between we have two boys and two girls. And so I've long appreciated this topic.
It's a difficult one politically, and I want to get to that in a minute. And I think you started to unpack some of that.
But when did you personally really start to see this and realize we needed to talk about it more? You know, it wasn't any specific moment or epiphany. It was, I love data, and the data here was just overwhelming when you just saw what was happening to college

attendance.

It used to be 40-60.

Now it's 60-40. It's probably going to be two to one female to male college grads the next five years because men drop out.
So there's literally going to be two female college grads. Literally had a CSU conversation along those lines.
Literally two to one. Yeah.
And then you look at just some of the dynamics around one out of three men under the age of 30 is in a relationship, two out of three women under the age of 30 is in a relationship. And you think, well, that's mathematically impossible.
It's not because women are dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. One in three men under the age of 25 is living with their parents.
One

in five at the age of 30 is living with their parents. So you just see the data so overwhelming.

And just on a personal note, Governor, I just relate to these young men. I think to myself,

had it not been for the generosity of California taxpayers and the regents of the University of

California and the irrational passion for my well-being and my mother and the fact that

Thank you. I think to myself, had it not been for the generosity of California taxpayers and the regents of the University of California and the irrational passion for my well-being and my mother and the fact that the tax policy and economic policy gave me just this upward spiral, you know, they're for the grace of God go I.
I relate to these young men. I don't think that, you know, when you're younger, you credit your grit and your character for your success.
My origin story up until the age of 40 was, check out my shit. I was raised by a single immigrant mother.
Now I'm a baller. Just smell me.
And then as you get older, you realize a lot of your success isn't your fault fault if had i not been born in california white heterosexual male in my you know in the 60s i just don't think i'd be here and by the way i'm not humble i think i'm a fucking monster i think i'm in the top one percent but the top one percent in this on this planet puts you in a room of 75 million people my life is better than the top seven and a half at least and that's because the smartest thing I ever did was to be born in America, specifically in California. And I realized that a lot of those features that really lifted me up by the scruff of my act and flung me forward at the speed of sound and of prosperity, that hand is getting weaker and weaker.
So one, the data is overwhelming. And two, I just really relate to these young men.

I was there. I didn't have a lot of economic or romantic prospects.
And things worked out for me because our nation decided that it loved the unremarkable. And I just, I worry that's no longer the case.
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Hope to see you over there. You've highlighted, you know, I think 4x the housing cost, 2x the educational cost, paychecks now declining and exacerbating these conditions.
And this sort of generational shift that you highlighted as it relates to seniors doing better and this generation, younger generation, doing worse for the first time in American history than their parents' generation. I know I want to connect.
Do you connect any of the dots in our conversation around terrorists? Do you connect any dots as it relates to deindustrialization? Do you connect any dots to any substantive policy decisions that were made in the United States of America? Or was it just a broader neglect and focus on what made America great? Was it a lack of intentionality in subsidizing higher education? Was it a lack of focus on yimbyism versus nimbyism as it relates to housing and the imperative there. Was there something that you really connect as a MoMA? Was it in the simple terms that often are painted in politics, Reaganomics and trickle-down economics and a broader sort of decoupling of commitment to the social well-being? So a lot there, but a couple of things that it isn't, a couple of reasons that didn't inspire this decline in the prosperity of young people of the American male.
The first is that manufacturing has gone away, and that's the problem. As manufacturing has gone away in the 70s, we've had more overall prosperity.
Americans aren't looking, you know, as Dave Chappelle said, we want to wear Nikes, not make them.

The notion that we're going to have the biggest own goal in history so we can bring more manufacturing and microwaves back is just stupid. The average assembly line worker for Foxconn working for Apple makes $500 a month or $6,000 a year in China.
The average executive at Apple headquarters makes over $200,000 a year. We have purposely traded off manufacturing for higher growth technology, systems, services, jobs.
So you make the case that's not it then? I mean, that's not fundamentally. We're still the second largest manufacturer in the world.
We've just outsourced the shitty manufacturing work. Have we left some people behind unfairly? Sure.
80% of Americans want more manufacturing. Only one in five want to actually work in manufacturing.
You can't take your dog to the shop floor, to the plant at Lansing, Michigan. Everyone loves the idea of manufacturing.
People want to design software. They want to be in the services industry.
They want to be an associate at J.P. Morgan, not tooling or making batteries somewhere.
The Ascent of Women has been wonderful. It has not come at the cross.
It has not come at the cost of men. I think there's a variety of things that are going on here.
One, just biological. Men mature less fast.
And when we even the playing field in academia, women blew by men. I would argue that the educational system is now biased against men.
A boy is twice as likely to be suspended on a behavioral adjusted basis, exact same infraction, a black boy five times as likely. Look at the behaviors we promote in school.
Sit still, be organized, be a pleaser, raise your hand. You're basically describing a girl.
You have wood shop, metal shop, and auto shop have gone away. So the online, kind of the on-ramps to a vocational job are not as clear.
We all knew that guy in high school. There was no way he was going to college, but he was fixing up his Trans Am in his driveway, and he could go to work making $30 or $40 an hour as a mechanic.
Now that path, that vocational path, those jobs are there, but sociologically we sort of shame shame those jobs, and we tell parents you failed if your kid is one of the two-thirds of kids that doesn't get into college. We've seen, you know, I would call a lot of mixed messaging to young men that pull up yourself, you know, pull yourself up by your boots if you're only more in touch with your feelings.
I think that modern masculinity from the right is be coarse and cruel, and from the left, it's be more like a woman. I don't think either of those is right.
I still think there's opportunity for men to embrace masculinity, being strong, being physically strong, being risk-aggressive, initiating romantic contact, being aggressive around trying to get a job you're not qualified for taking risks i think these are wonderful at being kind being a protector your default system as a protector so i think young men have gotten a lot of a lot of mixed messages more than anything we have made the conscious decision to transfer money from young to old. Old people have figured out a way to vote themselves more money, and they continue to do it.
The $40 billion child tax credit gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill. The $130 billion increase in cost of living adjustment for seniors flies right through Congress because old people vote.
And it's just insane to me that we have the largest economic transfer in history annually happen every, being redundant, 12 months from young to old. There used to be 12 people supporting every retired worker.
Now there's three. We haven't raised the age.
All this nonsense around Doge. They saved $2.5 billion.
You could six sacks of Doge by cutting off all subsidies to Tesla. If you really want to be an adult here about the fact that we're spending $7 trillion on $5 trillion in revenues, there's only two things you can do.
You're going to have to go after entitlements or you're going to have to raise taxes. And the answer is yes.
At some point, we're going to need an adult that says, I'm sorry, folks. We have to do both.
I'm the person that's going to cut your entitlements or at least means test it and age gate it. And I'm going to have to raise your taxes.
And what we've decided is the people who vote and the wealthiest people taxes for corporations are at their lowest level since 1929. the 25 wealthiest americans are paying six percent of taxes and we like to think that oh we can't lower taxes they're too high there's a strange dynamic in the u.s whereas

the people who get most screwed by our tax code are not only young people but well let's just stop there two biggest tax deductions mortgage interest rate and capital gains who owns stocks and homes people our age who rents and makes their money from salary young people social security tax my tax. My analyst who works for me makes $160,000, pays $9,000 to earn social security tax.
I make substantially more than that. And I pay $9,000 because we've decided to cap it such that it's a regressive tax.
So we keep transferring more and more money to the old. And what do you know? Young people aren't economically as economically viable, which is more more important for a man three quarters of women say economic viability is important in a mate only one in four men say that it's important so we essentially have just uh uh the most depressed obese and anxious generation in history and we ask ourselves why well of course they're upset they're not well as their parents.
They can't find a mate. There aren't as many venues to meet.
They meet online where they type in six feet or $100,000 plus. If you take out married, obese, and men over the age of 50, that's 2% of the male population.
Men need a place to demonstrate excellence. If you talk to couples that have been married longer than 30 years 75 of them say one was much more interested in the other at the beginning and it's almost always the male who was more interested than the woman because the downside of sex is much greater for a woman than a man we've been taught for thousands of years to spread our seed to the four corners of the earth Women have been taught for thousands of years to put up a much finer filter to pick the strongest, smartest, and fastest seed.
And some, they're just more selective. And I'm not suggesting they should ever lower their standards.
But typically what happened in those relationships is the man had a chance to demonstrate excellence. I worked with him and I found out he was really good at what he did.
We went to the same temple and I saw how kind he was to his parents. We spent time together and we worked at a food kitchen together and I saw that he was kind.
I liked his hands. I liked the way he danced.
I liked the way he smelled. And slowly but surely, he raised his game in my mind and we fell in love and decided to have a life together where does a man a young man demonstrate excellence to get through that much finer filter that women have they're not going to work they're not going to school the number of bars i'm living in london the number of bars in london has declined 40 kids don't have the money and they have this anti-alcohol movement and just so so I can really act like I'm crazy, I think young people need to drink more.

I think this anti-alcohol movement is the worst thing since remote work for young people.

I tell people jokingly, you need to go out, drink more, and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off.

Because the risk to your 25-year-old liver of alcohol is dwarfed by the risks of social isolation.

Well, as a guy who owns a few bars and wineries, I'm with you, Scott, on that. You're in.
Yeah, no, but it's interesting. I love hearing.
I mean, by the way, you've made this point about bars. It's interesting.
You're sincere about it. You're not just being flippant about it.
I mean, people are, to your point, I mean, they're more isolated, more lonely, and more disconnected. I mean, we can get to solutions in a minute, but it's actually one of your foundational principles to address some of these issues.
Not just bars, I mean, social settings that can bring people together. Sports leagues, church, nonprofits, national service, tax credits for places that bring people together, young people together.
And I mean, and I'll ask you this, think of your closest friends. I mean, your buddies where you get together and you just pick up a letter M no matter how long it's been since you've seen them.
Think about your romantic relationships in your life. What percentage of them did alcohol play some role in, in your formative years? Exactly.
Enough said. Enough said.
There you go. No, I mean, right.
I mean, everybody listening, how many people listen to your point? That's 90 plus percent of folks, right? I imagine. Well, and 6% of our youth are addicted to drugs and alcohol, 26% or 23% are addicted to social media.
Where's the real problem here? Yeah, well said. you talked about minimum wage at 725 and you've talked about the fact that if you ingested for

productivity and inflation be closer to what 23 24 or five dollars and that you talked about the

issues of vocation uh community college you know you brought up the woodshop frame and just how we

you know those jobs exist but we we haven't persisted in providing the sort of reputational support for those skills and the actual education that we pulled away from our education system, K-12. What else should we be focused on in terms of substantively trying to address this besides now having an honest conversation about it? Well, first off, I think you and the governor of Washington have shown a lot of leadership around minimum wage.
And that is what we found is that the myth that all these small businesses are going to go out of business is just a myth. That when you raise minimum wage, the wonderful thing about lower middle-income households is that when you give them a buck, they spend it all and it creates a greater multiplier effect.
And we haven't seen a decline in businesses, economic growth, or an increase in inflation when we raise minimum wage. So that's, in my opinion, that's a no brainer.
I like to think, I'm helping the Democratic Party with messaging. I like to think of a unifying theory of everything.
And the unifying theory of everything for me is anyone under the age of 40 that's a good person and works hard should be able to find someone and should be able to raise kids in a household without living in poverty. And the first thing is $25 an hour minimum wage.
I just don't, it would hurt Walmart stock, it would hurt McDonald's stock, and it would be worth it. I think more men in K-12 education, if you were to look, reverse engineer to the single point of failure for when boys come off the tracks, it's when they lose a male role model.
We have the most single-parent homes of any nation in the world. And when we say single-parent, we really mean mom is heading the household.
That's 92% of single-parent homes. And what it ends up is that girls in single-parent homes have the same outcome, same rates of high school attendance and self-harm.
Boys become much more likely to engage in self-harm and not go to college. It ends up that while boys are physically stronger, they're mentally and emotionally much weaker.
So we need more males involved in K through 12. And even just saying that boys need men in their lives used to trigger people.
And now mothers are recognizing that that's just not true. We need boys involved in men's life.
And Scott, you mean by that teachers, not just mentors, people that are advocates, counselors, and in what respect? Yes, all of the above. After school programs, coaches, they usually don't get paid.

More men, I think the Catholic Church and Michael Jackson have screwed it up for all of us. I think there's a lot of wonderful men out there that don't have families of their own.
There are three times as women applying to be big sisters as men applying to be big brothers in America. Why? One, men aren't stepping up.
And two, I think they feel self-conscious. If you're a 35-year-old male, maybe doesn't have your own family or your own kids, and you want to be involved or help out a 15-year-old son of a single mother, don't people look at you like there's something wrong with you? There are a lot of wonderful men out there that have loved to get paternal and fraternal.
And they're under the illusion that if they're not a baller, or they don't have a degree in adolescent psychiatry, they shouldn't get involved in a boy's life. I think of the rings of masculinity.
You've got to take care of yourself. You've got to be strong.
You've got to be economic viability. You take care of your family.
You take care of community. But I think the ultimate expression of masculinity is to get involved in the life of a child that isn't yours, and we need more men involved.
When my mom got divorced, she made sure that a couple of her boyfriends she kept in my life. There was a neighbor that used to come over with his girlfriend and take me horseback riding.
I made really good friends with a stockbroker and I used to swing by the brokerage, Dean Witter Reynolds in Westwood after school. I had a lot of wonderful men in my life.
So one, men need to step up, more Big Brothers programs, more coaching. I would like to see mandatory national service.
If you look at Israel, lowest levels of young adult oppression in the West, despite all the existential threats, I was just in Israel and I met with a battalion of 110 from the IDF, all these beautiful young men and women fit outdoors, learning how to handle assault rifles, getting to the point where they're so skilled that the man or the woman next to you would literally depend, you know, trust you with their lives and serving the agency of something bigger than themselves. And that's where they meet friends.
That's where they meet mentors, co-founders, and mates. I'd like to see national, mandatory national service where people can meet others from different sexual orientations, different income classes, different ethnicities.
So we start to see each other as Americans before we see each other as trans or Republican or rich or poor. I think any college that's not growing its freshman class faster than population growth should and has an endowment over a billion dollars should lose its tax-free status.
Dartmouth has $8 billion endowment, 500 students. It's not a college.
It's a hedge fund with classes. It's just insane.
If you had a drug that made people less obese, four times more likely to get married, likely to run for office, much less likely to get divorced, much less likely to have diabetes, would you hoard that drug? That's what me and my colleagues are doing at elite higher institutions. We purposely sequester artificially constrained supply.
We could let in 5x the number of kids we do now, but we're all drunk on exclusivity. When my dean announces we've rejected 85% of our applicants, you know what me and my colleagues do do we stand up and we applaud yeah it's awful yeah i really appreciate the university of california and what the cal state system is doing trying to increase its population by the by the amount of one class but unfortunately a lot of elite institutions have not have not received the memo i just toured i did a college tour with my son university of Chicago, 4% admissions rate, Duke 4% admissions rate.
And you were, by the way, literal when, and just for listeners, when you said 9% at UCLA, it's 9% at UCLA, 11% at Berkeley. It is interesting, Scott, over the entire system, it's now 70%, just broke 70%.
But at those specific campuses, because of UC Merced and other UCs, we're making progress, but it's not good enough. And your point, it's even worse if you look at degrees, if you're trying to get a computer science degree or something, you're talking 1%, 2%, 3% of people getting in.
And you're right. You hear it all the time, faculty and others.
It's not a knock at faculty, but people start to applaud. I've been in those meetings, just as you described, and it's gross.
And California gets it. I'm not a billionaire, but I've given a lot of money to UCLA and Berkeley because California gets it.
The Cal state system is probably the unsung hero. Right.
Biggest Pell Grant recipient in the world, in the United States.

Biggest conveyor belt of talent in the country.

Pell Grant saved my ass, Governor.

Yeah.

I'm the recipient of affirmative action because I came from a household that was in the lower third economically.

I got unfair advantage and I got Pell Grants.

I couldn't have gone to college without them.

And it's worked out for everybody.

And also, so I do think there's schools that get it. I think what ASU is doing with Michael Crow, I do think there are schools that UW-Madison.
I just took my kid to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 50,000 good kids from Minneapolis and Wisconsin, University of North Carolina, doing their job, trying to expand this. So some people get the memo.
The majority of elite institutions now see themselves as their mess bags, not as public servants. In terms of solutions, we just need to put more money in the pockets of young people.
I like what Portugal did with a tax holiday. If you gave every person under the age of 40 who makes less than $100,000 a tax holiday, it wouldn't cost us that much because the reality is they don't make that much money.
I think all capital gains should be like the reagan administration there shouldn't be there shouldn't be long-term or short-term why is sweat less noble than the money my money makes why is rent less noble than the money you pay for a mortgage that's nothing but an elegant transfer of money from the young to the old and then you want to talk about the greatest intergenerational theft in history, COVID. We took $7 trillion.
A million people dying would be bad, but if I got less wealthy, it'd be tragic. So we took $7 trillion, flushed it into the economy.
85% of it wasn't spent. It wasn't spent on food or medicine or housing.
85% of it wasn't spent. So where did it go? It went into the markets.
And housing went from 290,000 average household to 410 in just four years. The stock market went crazy.
So I got richer and richer. And young people, the entrance, everything got more expensive.
When you bail out the baby boomer owner of a restaurant, all you're doing is transferring opportunity away from the recent graduate of a culinary academy at 26 who wants her shot. The reason I get to live the life I lead economically is in 2008, we bailed out the banks, but we let the markets fall.
The markets are cyclical and disruption transfers power and money back from incumbents to entrants. And what did I get to do? I netflix apple and amazon at 8 10 and 12 dollars a share and netflix is at 9 40 where does a young person find value now because we've decided to use their credit card to bail us out when shit gets real i'm in the club doing rails of cocaine and champagne and the closest a young person gets is they get to throw me their credit card so I can spend, or the government can spend $7 trillion a year on $5 trillion in receipts such that young people are going to have to pay this shit back.
It's criminal such that the stock market stays high, such that you and I stay wealthy. So I think almost every major economic policy can be reverse engineered to one thing.
How do we maintain the incumbent's wealth at the cost of potential entrance? If I can just briefly enter the world of partisan politics. You know, it's interesting.
These trend lines have obviously accrued to the Trump candidacy. I mean, you saw with the numbers, I think, you know, and forgive me if I'm off a little bit, but I think in the first Trump election, he won 41% of young voters, 56% of young voters in this last election.
Obviously, so much focus on his outreach in terms of focusing on the quote unquote manosphere, focusing on sports, more of a hyper-masculine frame of outreach and engagement. Don't get me started or don't even get you started, though I would love to actually get you started.
But with the DNC's lack of engagement to young men, non-existent, doesn't exist in the Democratic Party, hasn't in the past. But give me a sense of your over-under.
Was that very intentional on his part? Was he just the beneficiary of that because of the neglect of the Democratic Party and he sort of stumbled into it? What do you make of the difference between the two parties in terms of trying to approach some of these issues in a sincere and honest way? The three biggest own goals in American history were our entry into Iraq, or in recent history, these ridiculous tariffs that is the most elegant way to reduce prosperity in history, and the Democratic Committee losing to an insurrectionist. And this is how we managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
This was supposed to be a referendum on women's rights, understandably. It wasn't.
Women's rights did not show up. What showed up was testosterone.
Specifically, young men are really struggling. And if you look at the three groups that pivoted hardest from blue to red, 2020 to 2024, it was one Latinos who I believe don't want to be identified as a group.
The Mexican-Americans in Southern California have much different priorities than Cuban-Americans in Southern Florida. And even identifying them as a group, I think, pisses them off too.
People under the age of 40, for your comments, they're just not doing well. And when you're not doing as well as your parents, you feel rage and all you want is disruption.
You don't even want change. You want the candidate who is kind of chaotic because you're like, whatever's going on here is not working for me.
And then the third and most interesting group that pivoted hardest from blue to red was 45 to 64-year-old women. And my thesis is that's their mothers.
and there's still a lot of women in the U.S. who will vote for what they perceive

is best for their husbands or their sons.

And when you're a mother and your son mothers and there's still a lot of women in the u.s who will vote for what they perceive is best

for their husbands or their sons and when you're a mother and your son is in the basement playing video games and vaping you don't give a shit about territorial sovereignty in ukraine or women's rights or transgender rights you just want change and the trump campaign to their credit was brilliant. They flew right into the manosphere.
Rockets,

crypto, Joe Rogan. He went on Joe Rogan.
Do you realize with 40 million YouTube videos and 15 million audio downloads, for Vice President to get the same level of exposure, Vice President Harris, she would have had to gone on CNBC, MSNBC, Fox, and CNN every night for three hours for two weeks. They totally outplayed us governor.
And then talk about young men not going to the Republican Party, but moving away from the Democratic Party. I, like you, was at the convention, and what I saw was a three-day parade of special interest groups representing everybody, but the one group that

has fallen furthest fastest, and that is young men. If you go to the dnc.org website, it has a site that says who we serve.
Explicitly, it says who we serve. And it goes on to list 16 demographic groups ranging from Asian Pacific Islanders to black Americans, the disabled veterans.
I added it up. It's 74% of the U.S.

population. When you say

you're explicitly advocating Pacific Islanders, to black Americans, the disabled veterans. I added it up.
It's 74% of the U.S. population.

When you say you're explicitly advocating for 74% of the U.S. population,

you're not advocating for them.

You're discriminating against the 26%.

And young men went viciously towards Trump.

So did the women in their lives supporting them.

And that was enough to swing groups who had traditionally been Democratic to Trump.

And this was a huge own goal.

An honest question is, how did we let this happen?

Quite frankly, we ignored the group that has fallen furthest fastest.

This was the testosterone election, and Trump figured that out and flew right into it. Look, if Democratic Party's not listening, they sure as hell better listen, or they're just going to repeat history.
I appreciate, Scott, you reinforcing this. And we're short on time, and I guess it begs the final question.
What is the hesitancy to the party? Is it just that you've heard the old phrase, pale, male. We've had all the privileges.
You mentioned 3,000 years of male dominance, the Me Too movement, this notion that we still have gender disparity. We still have all these issues.
Is it just our unwillingness as a party, the Democratic Party, to just own up to this fact? Or do we feel it's just we're talking only about white males? What is it that you think has restricted the capacity for the Democratic Party to fully embrace and understand this gap in terms of their electoral thinking, let alone the policy substance behind it. I think we became too obsessed with achieving social status versus doing things that actually helped people grow their material or their psychological well-being.
And I think identity politics has worked for a long time. I think it was just smart to cater to the specific needs.
And the easiest way to identify people was through their identity. And I think, and by the way, I'm really hopeful for the Democratic Party.
I think this tariff nonsense is just unbelievable opportunity for us to go. These people are insane and they're reducing our prosperity.
I think this is a gift to us. And the reason I have been and will be for the rest of my life a Democrat is that Democrats, we get it wrong, but our heart the right place we're trying to do the right thing sometimes do we carry it too far we do and what i would argue is using what needs to happen at universities as a metaphor for what needs to happen to the democrat you know i'll use the university of california in 1997 the university of california did away with race-based affirmative action and they shifted to an adversity score because.
Because what they realized is the daughter of a Taiwanese private equity billionaire is not diversity. But if you're a trans kid, a white kid who's trans, who's faced incredible uphill battle, you deserve a second look, a second shot.
And I think the Democratic Party needs to move away from identity politics and focus really on one thing, and that is the unifying theory of everything should be that if you're young and you're a good kid, you should be able to have a job that pays a certain wage, you should be able to find someone to fall in love with, and you should be able to have a home and kids. We need 7 million homes in 10 years, manufactured homes that cost 30 to 50 percent less than homes built on site.
We need a minimum wage of 25 bucks an hour. We need a tax holiday for people under the age of 40.
We need national service and more third places where people can fall in love. And stop this identity politics.
We are here to give everyone a shot. Everyone.
And affirmative action in America should thrive, but it should be based on color, and that color is green. We need, in America, this is a collective victory.
You'd rather be born gay or nine white than poor today. So let's go after, let's help the people, let's use the full faith and resources of the greatest experiment in history, the best performing organization in history, the U.S.
government that's offered more rights and prosperity for a lower cost taxes than any organization in history. Let's pull the full weight, let's put the full weight of that incredible organization around the people who need it most in the U.S., and that is the poor.
Let's stop this nonsense where the richer are protected by the law but not bound by it, and the poor are bound by the, but not protected by it. The constitution's here to protect the lower 50.
This nonsense of rounding people up and sending them to hellscapes. Guess what? No one you or I know is risk.
I could be in deepest, reddest Mississippi. I have access to mesifestron because I have money.
That is not why the government is here. The government isn't here to make you or me richer.
The government is to help the lower half. And I think that's where the Democratic Party needs to go and get away from identity politics because it's creating more problems than it's solving.
Scott, it's been wonderful to spend time with you. Thank you for your insight.
Thank you for your recommendations. And thank you for always being so candid and forthright.

Thank you, Governor.

And thank you to the taxpayers of California.

It literally changed my life.

I love it.