Scott Galloway: The Rich Are Quietly Preparing For The AI Collapse

It feels like a moving target. And I think I saw some stats the other day that said the subject of artificial intelligence is less popular as like an industry than even ice in the United States. In part because the big CEOs of these companies are saying our jobs and our way of life is going to be fundamentally disrupted and people don't feel like they have a say in that. We didn't choose this. What's your perspective on everything that's going on? There have been a few brands that have fallen further faster in the last 18 months than two brands. The United States brand abroad. We used to be the enforcer of the operating system to keep rogue nations in check. The US is now that rogue nation. So the US brand abroad for the first time in history more people feel that China is a force of good in the world than the US. That's never happened before. So the brand US has fallen for this fastest. The second greatest fall is AI. Your view of AI is directly correlated to your wealth. The only cohort that has a positive rating of AI is people making over $200,000.

Because generally speaking, wealthy people look at AI as something that's fueling their portfolios and wealthy people are the biggest users of AI. So they see it as a positive. They see it as innovation. They see it as the S&P going up. But if you're an average middle class person, what you may see is that your electricity bills have gone up and you don't even have access to invest in these companies. And you see some statements from people, Sam Altman saying, stop complaining about energy costs. Think about the amount of energy it takes to raise a child. So they haven't really managed the brand well. In the last 18 months, it's come from something kind of scary, but we can be optimistic and a wealth creator to something that's very scary and something that's a wealth creator for the wealthiest already. The brand in the last 18 months has had tremendous tremendous erosion. When I look at some of the quotes from the CEOs of these AI companies,

inherent rapid distribution every day, an anthropic release of model, tragedy release something, it spreads across the world very quickly and everybody's updating their technology at the speed of light, unlike the industrial revolution where you had to build infrastructure and physical infrastructure. Is there a case that because of the speed of this technology and the proliferation of it, that it will be unlike the revolutions of the past?

That's the fear that the V is so severe and so vicious that we don't have time to recover. And even if there is more jobs on the other side, that there's too much civil unrest around the V. But so far, the V doesn't be decelerating or diving as quickly as people had predicted. I was kind of reminiscing on the way over here. I moved here almost four years ago. The first thing I did, I got off a plane at night and I went to this amazing party at Annabelle's, this Brazilian party with all these hot people everywhere and I thought, I love London. In the next morning, I woke up feeling pretty hungover and my team said, you have this podcast with this young guy. And I said, cancel, I'm hungover. They said, no, he's really up and coming. He'll like him. He's a nice kid.

And I came into this little place and shorted it forever with all these cool coffee houses. I had no idea who you were. And within two years, you were fucking everywhere. It was like, I'm in the airport and I see your banner on your book. And then I get on the plane and the safety video has you in it. I'm like, make him stop. And my point is where I'm going with this is this place is like, I mean, it feels like the Googleplex, you're hiring like crazy. You're one of the most technically sophisticated people I know in media. And yet you're hiring a bunch of organic things walking around and eating and going out and drinking and having kids. So you're the example. Old media is going to lose jobs. But you're creating how many people have you hired in the last 24 months?

Across all of our companies about, I'd say about 220. Okay. And those are high paying jobs. Yeah. Those are young people probably making six figures plus. That's a lot of employment. So as the BBC or as the Daily Mail or whatever, laying off people, yeah. But I'm not sure the laying off people faster than you're hiring them. Yeah. And what I found is like, we're hiring a different type of person and IO influences becoming increasingly important. I'd say the other thing is that the only thing I noticed was 60 days ago, I'm, I consider myself to be the head of recruitment. We have a recruitment team downstairs and I own a recruitment business. But as I go through that inbox, people that I otherwise sit two months ago would have been, you know, jumping to higher. I'm now pausing because there's new technology that's been launched by these companies in America. That means there's alternative solutions. And that's what's giving me pause. People do need to consider ways that they can upskilled themselves with these technologies.

The labor market is definitely reshaping and it might reshape faster, but I'm not sure it's going to be the apocalypse. There'll be winners and losers. For example, for the last 30 or 40 years, the unemployment rate among college grads has been lower than non-college grads. It shifted this year. The unemployment rate among non-college grads because of the boom and vocational work is now lower than the unemployment rate among college grads. And if you think about it, you're like, okay, well, that's bad for new college grads. But at the same time, all of these data centers need carpenters, welders, plumbers. So there's been booms and other parts of the employment market.

But yeah, the employment market's absolutely reshaping. But when I graduated from business school, a lot of it quite frankly is your generation of spoiled. What do I mean by that? When I graduated from Berkeley in 1992, 40% of us had a job on graduation day, meaning 60% did not have a job. I would bet the kids in my class, it's stern. I bet 40% of them were starting their own business because with AI, when I graduated, there were two entrepreneurs in my class and the second person was my co-founder. We were the only business started in the hospital of business from 1992. I would bet there's going to be 30 to 50 businesses that are started on graduation day.

There's kids dropping out of their second year of business school to start businesses because they just raised $10 million in a series A. Now you have to have certain skills, a certain type of personality, a certain facility with technology. I'm actually quite excited about this. We're starting to see an uptick in productivity which should result in incremental profitability. Will some people be on the wrong side of the trade? Absolutely. Do we need to do a better job of providing more unemployment, more retraining? Denmark spends 2% of GDP on retraining and vocational training. We spend 0.2% in the US. We're not good at retraining. We're really bad at it actually. We're not good at taking care of the people on the wrong side, but as a global, in terms of global employment, I think the catastrophizing is dressed up fundraising.

What do you think about Elon's doing with Optimus? If you bring those two forces together,

go some weird places. But again, I think AI in robotics, yes, this notion that we're going to have robots serving us our food or in our house. I don't I don't see that. It's interesting because what I guess one could argue that we already have robots in our houses, but they just don't move.

So they're quite the leap really is would you allow a robot to move through your house? Because I mean a hoover is a robot. A fridge is kind of like a robot, especially the smart fridges. You one could say a TV is a robot a smart TV, but the difference is they don't move through a house. Would we allow the hoover to move itself? And then once we allow that, would we allow it to potentially bring us something? Yeah, I get it. I just don't the stuff I've seen on actual application of these robots. And keep in mind, these individuals, the job of the CEO now is it used to be to under promise and over deliver. Now it's over promise and under deliver and create a vision.

It creates cheap capital so you can pull the future forward. My understanding is three years ago, we had a million autonomous Tesla taxes on the road and that did not happen. In 2016, must-set or 2017, there was going to be autonomous was two years away driving. So their job is to predict a very exciting future. Also think Musk in particular is very good at saying look over here is these stuff to wrap it into a hat. I mean, Tesla is an automobile company, so he's got to create a story to justify its 155 times earnings when most automobile companies trade at 10 or 15. So it's robots. It's space. It's connectivity with AI and autonomous and robots.

It's constantly look over here because I think it's very difficult to justify the valuations he's raising money at. So to be clear, he as much as anybody is able to pull that vision forward. He's launched 90% of the rockets sent into space have been by SpaceX. But this is a company that's trading that has $16 billion in revenue with 8 billion in profits and it's going to go out in its IPO at a projected valuation of 90 to 110 times revenues. When Google went public and went out at 10 times revenues and it was growing 10 times as fast. So what is this? The key attribute of an innovator right now is storytelling and that is to make sure the promise is way ahead of the performance such that you can access cheap capital and pull the future forward. But a lot of this stuff I find is a lot of jazz hands. He's always, you know, he's often known for being wrong about his timelines. But he does seem to have a magic to the world.

The best product in my mind, the two products that have changed my life from a technology standpoint, most underrated product is AirPods. If AirPods alone, you know, Tim Cook just stepped down where its own product would be a Fortune 50 company. I don't even think it's technology. I think it's the most profitable ubiquitous piece of jewelry in history. I just walk around with them in my years now. Right. And then the best product I think the last few years has been Starlink. That's amazing. I just think it's absolute. I've done podcasts from planes. I can talk to my sons on FaceTime. That product is, you know, all airlines are flying the same tin can, same routes, same bad food, a real point of differentiation for them. And that's also in maritime. I think Starlink is the best tech product. So power to him. When they go public, is it an immediate SpaceX and an amazing company, or is it overvalued? The answer is yes. It can be true at the same time.

What do you think of Tesla? Because for me, it's magic. I don't think people in Britain realize this were other parts of the world. But for me, the first time I got in the Tesla that I got in LA and pressed the location and took my hands off the wheel. What I had to do is occasionally look in look forward, which they're removing now. And it took me three and a half hours to Joshua Tree without any intervention. And the safety record in it is safer than if I had driven myself there. It's just magic to me. And then when I watch this, the space rockets come down and be caught with the chopsticks. I get this is just magic. And so when he, I've got to be honest, when he says that these Optimus robots are going to be, I go, do you know what? He's delivered a lot of magic in the past that no one would have thought possible. Can you even imagine 10 years ago him saying that what people would have said if he said we're going to launch this massive sort of 70-foot skyscraper into the air. And then we're going to catch it on top sticks.

Stagrin. And then we're going to relaunch it again. And then we're going to catch it again. You would have gone impossible. Addison of our generation. But you asked about Tesla. I bought a Tesla. Incredible product. Far superior to anything on the market. He deserves credit for inspiring the EV race, which will be good for the environment. But the reality is everyone's caught up. The fastest growing out of a build company in history is BYD. BYD is basically an 80% of a Tesla. Some people would say 100% of a Tesla for 40% of the price. If there wasn't a ridiculous tariff war right now, BYD I think would be the number one EV in the United States.

It's eating Tesla's launch. In addition, what I think is going to have about Tesla, credit where it's due, changed the market, inspired the EV race. Good for the planet. But when you look at its valuation right now, I think what you're going to see is when SpaceX goes public, there's a lot of money in the market that wants to get some of that musk risk, what you were talking about. This guy is incredible. I don't care how expensive it is. I want to invest behind Elon Musk. I get it. That money is about to come out of Tesla, which people are finally figuring out. It's just a great car company that should be trading at 30 times earnings, not 150. It's going to go into SpaceX. I think the retail surge in SpaceX, you can see in the valuation that it's planning to go out of. It's just extraordinary.

Some of that is going to come at the cost of Tesla. I think people are waking up to the fact that

you know, I'm the part of your brain around understanding new technologies begins to die.

Right. I can no longer perceive a calendar. I can't tell you what I have next for some reason. I used to be able to do fantastic. I could do a Scotsman accent, even like no one's business a few years ago. That part of my brain has died. And when I try to do an accent, it sounds like a dead language that twins speak to each other and it offends everybody. There's parts your brain that die. And the part that where you can understand new technologies or at least have the will to learn them starts to go away as you get older. I have to force myself to play with these new technologies. Everyone who wants to make more money or wants to hold onto their job should have the same honest to learn these new skills. On that individual level, there's people listening now that want to make sure that they have the skills that kids have the skills of the future.

Right. What are some of those important skills? I mean, you've got kids. What do you, what would you say to that? I get outside all the time. What is the skill? So the honest answer is I have a view, but nobody knows. You've got like 10 years ago in private schools. The biggest incremental investments in curriculum were two things. Computer science and Mandarin. How's that worked out? Thank God my kid knows Mandarin. I mean, said nobody right now, but they thought it was going to be computer science. And you could argue that hasn't worked out as well as everyone thought. I would say that the enduring skill is storytelling. And that is your ability to look at data, create a narrative arc, and then communicate that story in a compelling way via all the different mediums. Whether it's broadcasting, I think you have to write well to be a great storyteller. But if you think about the most successful people in the world, at the end of the day, they're usually storytellers. The great CEOs, I read Jeff Bezos, 1997 letter to shareholders where he focused on those three principles and take my money. I see even a guy like Alex Carp at Palantir walking around doing a live earnings call on his phone. It's very compelling. And Jensen Huang, when he does these giant buffet like

stadiums where he gets up and he's like a rock star, that's storytelling. Technology is I think going to create an equalization among the product. Reverse engineering created parity among manufacturer products. I think most technologies are going to converge and we're seeing that convergence in AI models. So I think the point of differentiation is relationships. Do I want to work with this person? Do I know about their kids? Do I like them? At the end of the day, I have three different law firms pitching me business, three different investment banks, three different CRM companies. Who do I have the best relationship with and who do I want to work with? So storytelling, it sounds very passe, but the ability to establish strong relationships with other sentient banks. I still believe that everything reverse engineers to biology. I think it's a certain fundamental understanding of the sciences. Those seem to be pretty enduring. You know, my oldest that he want to be a marine myologist. I'm like, who are you kidding? You get seasick. I mean, at 18, where you want them to be smart, good people, aggressive support them becoming their own person, which I've had trouble with. I want them to be many me's and then helping them find

something they're great at. But telling your kid, no, you need to go into this because this is where the future is going. No, we don't know. We know the basics. I would want my kid to be able to write well, be able to look someone in the eye to be competitive. I encourage them to play sports to do chores, which they do none of. But other than that, I don't know. What do you think are going to be the skills of the future? I think it's really difficult to know. I think what you said about relationships is really important. You said storytelling and I think storytelling is a proxy of sales and persuasion and whether that's persuading and invested to believe in you or people to come and work for you or customers to come and buy your thing. So I think storytelling in sales is going to be a enduring skill. The skill that is the biggest threat that people are, young people are losing, especially young men. In this is a skill and it's usually underrated is the ability to endure rejection. And because of AI and because of these frictionless relationships that people are engaging in online, I think a lot of young people, especially young men, are losing a perseverance, endurance, willingness to hear and know whether it's expressing friendship,

whether it's applying for a job or not qualified for, whether it's approaching someone and expressing romantic interest. I think a lot of young people, especially young men, I think they can have a frictionless relationship online and they're losing a sense of resilience and aggressiveness. So I think that skill, when I mentor young men, the first skill I try to reincorporate back into their life is what I call know. And that is I need you to go out, I need you to go put yourself in the agency of strangers, whether it's a church group of sports league, a riding class, and I want you to make an overture and expression of friendship. Hey, do you want to grab the arsenal game or watch it? And then most of these kids, when you ask them what they want, they usually want two things, the men I mentor, they want to move out of their parent's house, and they want to go for it.

And so once we do the friend approach, then I say, okay, find someone you may be potentially interested in, ask them out for coffee, and this is the goal. The goal is know. Because what's going to happen is you might get a no, probably going to get a no, and then I'm going to call you the next day, and I'm going to say, are you okay? And the answer is going to be yes. Is he or she okay? The person who said no, yeah, they're fine. Because, and I'm, I'm boasting out, the secret to my success is rejection. I ran for sophomore and junior and senior class president in my high school. I lost all three times, and based on my track record, I decided to run for senior body, or student body president, where I want to get this lose. Never bothered me. I mean, I'm mourned and I moved on. Every entrepreneur, how many knows have you gotten? So fucking out, and we'll say that anybody. I mean, so the any person you look at and think that person has made more money than I would have thought, or any person who's hanging out with someone much higher character and hotter than them has one thing in common, either a very rich parents, or more likely, they're comfortable with no. So, and unfortunately, I think young people,

especially young men, are becoming less and less resilient to know. Apply for jobs you're not qualified for. Apply to graduate programs you shouldn't get into. Approach people who you perceive as being cooler and hotter than you and express friendship and romantic interests. That is the key. You want to punch above your weight class, get out a big spoon and get ready to eat shit. That is the only thing that is common across all great entrepreneurs who are self-made, is they have the ability to mourn and move on. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It was inspired by listening to Adam Neumitt on that podcast a couple of weeks ago. He did one with Rick Rubin, I think it was. In it, he tells the story of sitting in the back of the cab with Massa, who's the owner of Softbank. He was going to ask him to give him $300 million. Massa tans him and says, you're just not ambitious enough. He says, by the time that 23-minute cab drive had finished, Massa had offered him $4 billion and he had signed a little napkin thing that Massa had in the back of the cab. That story and other stories like it have made me realise that some of the game in life and success is what I now call selling yourself low. Most of us go through our

life selling ourselves short. I think in part because we don't see ourselves on an exponential curve. We see ourselves as a fixed state. This is who I am. This is what I'm worth, but you've almost got to factor in your own exponential improvement. If you take you from 21 to now, how your intelligence and wisdom and connections have all compounded, but you would have sold yourself at the value of you at 21 years old. I actually now think in every season of my life I've sold myself short. When I was 18 years old, I sold 20% of my company for $5,000. Then I thought that was, I couldn't believe it. I was celebrating in my room at the time I was stealing Chicago tampeats as to feed myself. Then a couple of years later, I sold another 30% of my company for 300K.

I thought I'd hit the Euro millions. That company ran up and was on the stock market for many hundreds of millions, many years later. I thought, God, I've sold myself short my whole life. So I assume I'm doing the same now. If I assume that, what would I say? What opportunities would I go for? For me, that should apply to everybody. I think it's self-fulfilling. Yeah, there's something about imagining what you want to be in five years, outrageously, in the reverse engineering back. But the moment you took that 300K, you really needed it. That was, so it's a function of your opportunity set and what's actually the market says to you.

I think pricing is a signal. I struggle with pricing. What I tell whenever we're writing a proposal okay, whatever I get back, I'm like okay, increase the pricing 30% or 50% more because pricing is a signal and you can always take the price down. The client, the person always comes back and asks for the price down. But I mean, quite frankly, and this is sexist, I think men are better at imagining an unrealistic self and women are more measured. And I think that's one of the things that is held back. Women is entrepreneurs and the fact that not as much capital has been available to them because the people allocating capital have been wiped out from Stanford or Harvard. 40% of ECs are from two schools. I think it was Charlie Munger who said, someone who has a crazy vision of their own potential that's stupid and obnoxious. His attitude was never bet against that person because occasionally they're right. And so for, we talked about Musk.

For a guy to think, I'm going to raise so much money and command technology that I can be responsible for 90% of launches and control 70% of the Earth's low orbit satellites. That's pretty arrogant. So yeah, I agree with you. And let me put it this way, if you're going to err, err to the upside, because the market will bring you back on its own. Yeah, that's so true. Some of them has been in all the news lately, in part because of this article that the New Yorker did to which is their Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marence, which was this article. And then he responded with this blog post here. Two years ago, I thought Sam had a really good brand. He was out in Congress. He was saying, you know, he was asking for regulation. It seemed it is turned unbelievably quickly, unbelievably fast.

Well, we said this before. He's a proxy for all of AI. I think the greatest brand destruction other than the US over the last 18 months has been AI and also Sam Altman. But we keep falling into this trap over and over. And that is something happened through the 70s, 80s and 90s. And that is America. It's heroes used to be athletes, government officials, and actors. And then there was a dramatic decline in attendance to religious institutions, but people still have really big questions and want sort of an authority or a godlike figure. The closest thing we have to religion is technology. Most people don't understand it. It has a mystical feel to it. I have no idea how my phone works. I can ask it anything and it comes back with a relatively authoritative answer that I trust, somewhere if I was talking or praying.

Like most of the time when we were on AI, we're kind of praying. We're sending a question into the yaku to a being thinking it's smarter than us and it's going to come back with an empathetic loving, correct answer. So the new Jesus Christ was born in the 90s and that was Steve Jobs. And he was taken from us early like Jesus Christ. The idolatry of innovators is absolutely gone crazy. And the new Jesus Christ, if you will, are these tech CEOs. And here's what we failed to understand. They do not have our best interests at heart. They are not concerned with our emotional well-being. They are not going to comfort us when we're older. They are there and they play a key component in capitalism to do anything that is required to get their earnings up one cent per share every day. And they will make incremental decisions that justify the harming and self-harm of teen girls, Cheryl Sandberg, the weaponization of our platforms to make the coarsening of our discourse, Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, the radicalization of young men, the people running YouTube, they, we keep thinking that the newest tech CEO is going to save us. That this guy cares. Sam Altman was the gay son we all wanted, like super nice, super friendly, hush voices, well-centered.

I'm worried about that as well, right? These guys would sleep at their cousin for a nickel. That's their job. Their job is to increase earnings. They're not here to save us. We're supposed to elect people who put in guardrails for them. So everyone is saying, are asking me, can we trust Sam Altman? I'm like, no, and we shouldn't have to. We should have regulators putting in guardrails on AI. We should be testing these things, government agencies should be testing these things. We should be ensuring that these technologies are not used to surveil Americans, right? That we would still have cartoons like characters on cigarettes marketing to 12 year olds if we hadn't put in place regulation.

And the tobacco executives would claim that they weren't marketing to young people. Ford would still be pouring mercury into the river if we didn't have an EPA in regulation. So Sam is doing exactly what he's supposed to be doing. The latest hero that's going to save us is Dario Amodei. We've decided he's the good guy now. The villain's journey and tech is the same. Some compelling person, we think is a wonderful guy, and it's almost always a guy, occasionally a woman, you know, we need to do better gender balance. That was Cheryl Sandberg in the workplace. And then we find out that they are doing their job and that is doing anything they can legally to increase shareholder value regardless of whether it prevents a tragedy, the commons or not. And then we get angry at them.

The journey from Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader gets shorter and shorter, but they all follow the same path. And then 18 months later, we realize that they will do, we'll say and do whatever they can to try and delay and obfuscate regulation. And that sometimes when we don't have a government, with a lack of domain expertise, with a lack of insight, with people who are across between the land of the dead and the golden girls and don't understand these technologies, then when these technologies are allowed to run just free with no regulation, they do bad things. So Sam Alman is the latest person we've discovered as Darth Vader who's gone to the dark side. It happens with all of them because they're doing their job. We as citizens aren't doing our job and that is we're not putting in place elected officials to regulate these companies. So yeah, can we trust Sam Altman? No, but we shouldn't need to trust him. We should be able to trust that we have smart elected officials that will regulate these companies. Did you see this old school fever in response to being having a molotov cocktail throw in his house? I read this article without reading it. So there's been death threats on his life. And let me be clear, there's absolutely no

justification whatsoever for this. And it needs to be, I don't even like it when people yell at JD Vance when he's skiing with his family. We don't want to be that nation or we don't in the West, we have a city. If you're operating with the confines of the law, which Sam is, he deserves a living piece. It is sad. Do you realize in the US now, there's no more people working in private security than there are cops? Really? Because there's always going to be a number of people who are likely, I don't know about the perpetrator here who are mentally ill and who will find an excuse, essentially the makeup usually of these perpetrators or these these these criminal actors, is there usually young men looking to restore their social capital through what they perceive as a historic act of violence against a famous person? This has gone on for a long time. He's now famous.

I don't think it's fair. I've seen some people try to equate AI's dangers as if these acts of violence are somehow justified. They're not. There's no justification for a healthcare executive being executed in the streets. There's no justification for violence against Sam or attempted violence against Sam and his family. I think it's young men with a lack of opportunity, mental illness, and unfortunately access to firearms everywhere, but it's always happened. I don't make the connection that somehow it's more justified. I think famous people, one in three presidents has been shot at. Crazy, isn't it? So the more famous you get, quite frankly, the more personal risk there is, because someone is going to decide that taking you out for whatever reason is going to restore their social capital. Actually, if you look at assassination attempts and violence, it's actually gone down, but these stories are cinematic and very interesting and they get a lot of attention. But I think it's a shame we live in a society where, especially in the West, where they have to endure that kind of risk. One of the really most lovely moments I've seen on it, because I don't know if it was the Danish and the Norwegian Prime Minister who stepped down,

they applauded, and he got on a bike and rode home. I thought, you can't do that in the US. Obama's kids still have secret service protection. So there's definitely something, I quite frankly blame it on Big Tech that tries to convince people that this person is their enemy and this person is evil. I don't know him personally. I sat next to him at this party I went to, but he's doing his job. Quite frankly, we're not doing ours. Do you think he's a nihilist? I don't really know

These are some of the most concerning conversations I've had. One of the things that happens when you have a podcast and interesting people come on and you start hanging around with more interesting people and more powerful people is you get little peaks into new worlds but you didn't know existed. You get to see behind certain curtains. I remember having a particular conversation in London at a kitchen table where someone was describing one of these AI CEOs to me and basically making the case that they believe there's a roughly 10% chance. I think they said seven. If I'm not misunderstanding, percent chance that it's that it will result in the end of the world. Some catastrophic event but they really didn't care because they think that being the person that summoned this new intelligence amongst us was probably more consequential than whatever happens. If I wasn't privy to hearing this second hand from someone I know who knows this person extremely well. I know he knows extremely well because they hang out him telling me that I wouldn't

have believed this. I would have thought to myself they must be kind because they have kids and but actually now I very much believe what you're saying about this nihilism where I don't actually believe they give a fuck. Some of them. I actually don't believe some of them give a fuck. I actually think some of them are playing a game and they're playing a video game with our futures. Or the incentive is like in the United States when I was growing up my dad's boss had a slightly bigger house and he drove a Cadillac and we drove a grand terino but we were members of the same country club and his house was a five minute drive away and maybe my dad's boss got to fly business class and we flew coach. The Delta in having money having a decent you know having a middle class life and an upper class was like this. Now the Delta is this. What's the good air transportation flying on spirit airlines is a humiliating dangerous experience. United Airlines economy economy comfort economy plus business class first class oh wait that's not enough. Let's go to private. There's charter. There's fractional. There's a sesance notation. There's a bombardier challenger 300. There's a global 650 now. There's a new G7.

The Delta in your life in your healthcare. My mom was very sick when I was very young and when I think about how humiliating it was for the two of us having her to endure cancer when we were under insured. It was a devastating traumatic humiliating experience. Now if I need I take Lunecito and I travel because I have trouble sleeping. I have a medical constipation company. They get me to the drug delivered within two hours to my house. I have NAD treatments. They arranged for someone to come to my house when it's convenient for me and do it in my living room. I can text my doctor. I have a medical kit with all these things in it. If I'm abroad I can text my doctor and say my son's not feeling well. They FaceTime me. I open the kit. They can tell me exactly what to do. The healthcare I am receiving right now. I have my blood taken every three months.

They send it to some bond layer in Norway with PhDs who can tell me that I have less than a 0.7% chance of any cancers as evidenced by a lack of whatever it is. Anybody is the cancer cells. The healthcare now for the point for the 1% is dramatic and it's all the same thing. The bottom 99% of Western societies are essentially being optimized and monetized to make the life of the 1% just unbelievable. The life you can lead in the 1% is so dramatic and so incredible. broader selection set of mates, your kids have better healthcare, better educational opportunities, you have influence, people want to know you. So the incentives to not be rich but to be very rich are so incredible and the way you get very rich is through stock options typically in technology that I think the incentives are so great that people will make incremental decisions and ignore the fact that one in 18 girls who are self-harming in the UK cite Instagram as a reason for that.

Well let's find research that maybe create some doubts because once I become a billionaire I'll be a better person and they're getting so much criticism and so much shit posting and it's so competitive and there's fewer and fewer winners that become much bigger. It used to be five companies won and got hundreds of millions of dollars and one company wins and gets tens of billions. So you can see how incrementally this path to Darth Vader is pretty tempting. So I think they just get caught up in, they get caught up in this competition and they lose all side. Also my co-host on the pivot podcast said something that was illuminating me during COVID.

I was walking down the street with my sister and a homeless person kind of stirred. There was a lot of homeless people because they took the homeless shelters turned out everybody and she jumped out of her skin and I said well that was a bit of an overreaction. He's not going to hurt us and she said you know you're six to one ninety easy for you to say you don't understand you women walk around in a constant state of fear and that fear is rational and it really struck me and then Cara said these guys don't understand anything about victimization because they've never been victims. They're traditionally white males who have grown up in upper-income households and they've never really understood what it's like to be a victim so they don't put in place the safeguards. It's so competitive that it's just easier for them to give money some strategic money to key people and ensure that they're not regulated such that they can get to be billionaires because all the incentives are do whatever is required to win. Samuel Altman isn't going to be remembered for being a good or a bad guy. He's going to be remembered for the guy who either was the number one AI company or blew it. That's what he's going to be remembered for and right now he's blowing it

it appears right but people are going to look back and say well he didn't get public. Anthropic ended up being at worth more. It was kind of a disappointment financially but he was a good guy. That's not what he's going for and quite frankly that's not what our society rewards. I've already talked to me founders they all carry the same belief but the biggest threat to their small business is having a bad product. It's not. The biggest threat they face is hiring the wrong person for their small team because bad hires put the handbrake on growth and rapidly infect company culture and I get it. When you're starting out you need a players to grey your company but you don't have 40 spare hours to spend sifting through interviews.

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oh no, we said it would be six weeks, it's five and a half weeks, everything's going to plan when we're winning the war. And you'll get it seeing three things. What would actually happen in your view here? I think that he was talked into by some of the security advisors in Netanyahu that his legacy could be restoring or making the Middle East more peaceful and being the president that severely diminished the capacity of what has been arguably the number one source of terror in the region and maybe even around the world for a long time. That this was his defining moment as a president to go in, that they were weakened, they were hobbled, and we had the military assets

and the intelligence to go in and topple the regime, and he would be known as the president that liberated the Middle East. I think he bought into that. Over the back of Venezuela. Well, which was a kind of success. Not kind of. That was arguably one of the greatest military operations in history, but it was a military operation. It wasn't a war. I mean, supposedly his guards did know what happened. I'll certainly run the floor throwing up because there was some sort of crazy radiation or radio waves. Not a single American soldier killed, lifted him out. I mean, that was an incredible operation. I think he got drunk on that macho and that success and thought, well, I can do the same thing. And the problem with wars is that the enemy has a say. And what we have found since I think a lot of our leaders believe that wars could ultimately, if you have a bigger army, will result in unconditional surrender on the other side. And there really hasn't been unconditional surrender since World War II. And all the enemy needs to do, whether it's the Vietcong or the Taliban or the IRGC, all they need to do is survive and they win. In addition, I would describe the wars being the operational excellence in strategic

and competence. I actually believe there was justification and some merit to the idea of a military operation that tried to take advantage of a weakened Iran, where his air defenses were down to take out the IRGC, or at least maybe provide cloud cover for a revolution against the IRGC to administer Navy, diminish the nuclear capabilities, diminish the missile launch capability. I think there was real justification for that. The problem was the strategic and competence here, not going to, not enlisting some European allies, not briefing Congress, not coordinating with Gulf allies, not recognizing the game theory around what happens if they start firing at ships in the street of Hormuz. It just was strategically incompetent. And now we're in a situation where we wanted to administer nuclear capacity, but the reality is if they can maintain an ability to turn off and on the straight of Hormuz, that is probably more powerful than them having nuclear weapons. If you look at what happens if the fertilizer or the products that create fertilizer are further sequestered, you could have a mass starvation event around the world.

And so we've essentially given them potentially a weapon that's more powerful than a nuclear weapon. And also we look like we have a bit of a glass jaw. We go in, we lose 14 soldiers, tragedy for them and their families. The Russians are losing 1,000 people a day and they don't show any signs of giving up. We look like this giant boxer who's the most skilled and biggest boxer in the world. We go in argument over whether we should go in or not, but now if we withdraw, what incentive do the Iranians right now have to negotiate? When every day this goes on, they look like the little guy that stood up to the evil American Israel. I think this has been a disaster from a US brand standpoint. And I would argue that them blocking inbound and outbound traffic from Iranian ports is actually the way to go. But that lends itself to the argument we should have just continued with economic sanctions. But I have to own it. I thought military action was a good idea. I would argue, I apologize for its salad here, that we've been at war with Iran for 47 years. Their first act of this regime in 1979 was to take 110 Americans hostage.

70% of the IEDs in Iraq were built in Iran. We have been at war with Iran for a long time. The question is whether or not this military action slash war was worth it. And it looks as if it was so poorly executed on a strategic level that it is really diminished our brand. And we're now in the definition of a quagmire. If we leave, we look weak and any nation we perform military action against it says, start firing missiles at their neighbors. You know who summarized every war for the US right now is in this war was Ho Chi Minh when he was describing Vietnam. He said, they will kill a lot of our people. We will kill some of theirs. They will tire. They will go home.

We killed a million people in Vietnam. We lost 58,000 and we left. Yeah, right? So Americans tolerance for pain and I'm not suggesting that we should go on military at misadventures. But this right now is no doubt turning out to be a giant win for the IRGC and a pretty severe loss for America that further alienates us from our allies and shows kind of our soft tissue around our willingness to actually finish the job. The other statement that kind of perfectly summarizes this war is we broke it. Now you fix it. We're leaving the world a much more insecure place, much more economically vulnerable Gulf states thought that having a US military base was Kevlar and ended up just putting a giant bullseye on them. So people are going to think twice before they cooperate with our US military by hosting bases. We appear to have not thought through getting our expats out of the Gulf, protecting the Gulf states. And on bias, I think the Trump administration will be known for a criminal for corruption and incompetence and that incompetence is bubbling up.

I watched a press conference of his last night where he said this, which kind of links to what you were saying. They're delaying it because we don't know who to deal with. They know who the leader is in this country. We don't know who the leader is in Iran. I just thought, you know what, if I was running Iran, that's exactly what I would want. We don't know who to deal with Trump. We don't even know who to negotiate with. If he can't negotiate, he can't do anything. So I think I think the Iranians potentially the IRGC are saying that we don't even know who's leading. Because then what can you do? You can't just keep bombing. That's not going to work. You also can't negotiate. So it runs the clock down. You can affect a regime change from the air.

They, the Iranians are smart. They have distributed power. Yeah. So there's no kind of head of the snake to cut off. But also a lot of this is incompetence in our part. Do you know what we have done in the US to our diplomatic corps? We've absolutely gutted it. When Vance goes to Islamabad thinking he's going to do a deal, if you look at the history of every truth, of every deal, of every summit, 97% of the work is done before they hit the tarmac by diplomats who go through line by line and iron out and talk to each other and negotiate. We've gutted our diplomatic corps. Our counterintelligence operations have been gutted. So we're kind of flying blind without instruments.

And they think that JD Vance going to Islamabad for a TikTok moment where he tries to look presidential and then blames it on the IRGC. It's not going to work. So I think a lack of investment in key areas, a lack of soft power, whether it's to cutting USAID, a lack of respect for our diplomatic corps and the engine room like, like, you know, actually working with people and talking to them. I think this level of incompetence and arrogance is all bubbling up. And they, you're right. They don't even know who to talk to. That's good. They don't even know who to negotiate with. And by the way, you got to look at incentives. If I'm the IRGC, I'm like, why don't we need to do a survive? Yeah. Every day this goes on. And by the way, we're in the middle of what I'd call the first AI meme war. And that is Trump is communicating with truths on true social and these macho videos and memes of him as Jesus Christ. But he's been bested by kind of the Sloppy Gando or the AI memes of the IRGC. Have you seen these Legos memes?

They understand him better than he understands them. They are outstanding. And it's a group of 18 to 25 year old probably people who look like this group. None of this will revolve. In Tehran, figuring out AI driven means highly produced, highly effective, very strong message going right after the portrayals of the Epstein island. And I mean, they are doing a much better job because as Lincoln said, and it goes back to basics, he can't win a war without public support and he can't lose a war with public support. And right now, Iran is winning what you would call the Sloppy Gando war. They're putting out better information and propaganda than us right now.

And what you had to predict this ends because as you said, we can't back out of this war as the worst. Trump can't back out of it. But he also just can't keep doing it. The midterms are coming up. His approval ratings are, I think, in all time low because of this war. His base is turning on him. So he can't, it's like lose, lose at this moment. Yeah. So the honest answer as I don't know because he's unpredictable. If I had to pick anything, I think there'll be a multinational force that has a vested interest in ensuring the straight of horror moses open. There's so many things we've taken for granted in the West and one of them is freedom of navigation.

If Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia decide we need money or we need geopolitical power, we're going to close the straits of Malika or the strait of Singapore. What if China closes off certain straits in the South China Sea, where something like 60% of trade goes through? We have always enforced, we've gone to war over this basic notion of freedom of navigation, that pretty much any ship goes pretty much gets to go anywhere with pretty much anything on it. So I think that European nations, Asian nations all have a vested interest in ensuring the straight of horror moses is open. The way to do that is by sequestering or blocking, offloading and unloading of oil into Iranian ports. Because at some point, it not only shuts them off economically. I didn't know this, but within I think about 12 weeks, if you can't offload the oil and get it somewhere, it backs up and actually starts to damage the source well.

It stops up. So I think ideally, the optimistic scenario is there's a multinational force that enforces the straight of horror mose. He comes up with a series of objectives. If he had in his first, if he had outlined, we're going to take out most of their navy, we're going to give the Iranian people an opportunity to overthrow the IRGC. We're going to take out the majority of the missile capability. And after 72 hours said this is a win and got the hell out and coordinated with the Gulf States to say, what can we do to ensure your safety? I think it would have been a win. But now I don't even know what his objectives are. Can you list what his objectives are? I don't know what they are. They seem to keep. We're going to be out very soon, which is why we need to continue this war. The communications here in thinking has been so sclerotic and difficult to track. I'm like, who's boarding what ships? Is it a ceasefire?

Isn't it a ceasefire? He claims that them commandeering two Western vessels is not a violation of the ceasefire? Of course it is. That's it. Actually, that's an act of war. So we don't even know what to look for. You asked me how does this turn out? I think a multinational force that opens the straight of horror mose. Too many people have too much vested interest in free navigation. But in such a scenario, they're probably building up drones right now. In a ceasefire underground, they'll be building drone factories in every bunker and around right now. In a minute, you do a multinational force in the straight of the mose, those drones start hitting ships. And then the big company say, I'm not putting my ships through there. I think that's a fair point. Actually, not that many ships have gone down, but it's actually an insurance problem. If you have two million barrels on a tanker, you've got a $160 million payload. Someone has to take receipt of that, someone has bought it. So there needs to be middlemen in the form of insurance. And no one wants to ensure, take that kind of risk right now. So it's a lack of insurance, more than it is a lack of safety from the threat. But I do think the reality is the Iranians, by the IRGC,

I say the bottom line is you go after the money. You don't bomb civilian infrastructure. That's a war crime. But making it very difficult for them and creating a carrot, you can have free flow of oil. If you look at the Arab Spring, if you look at revolutions, they're usually a function of unemployment or economics. So if you were to inhibit their ability to export oil, that brings them to the table because the IRGC has been able to survive because millions of families in Iran are dependent upon the IRGC for their check. They control the most profitable biggest parts of the economy. So if you cut off their economics, that I think or threatened to, I think that brings them to the table. I think that's the most optimistic scenario. It's the straits open by a multinational force and there's a feeling of safety because it's enforced. Iran agrees to keep it open. And somehow we develop a series of objectives that we claim those boxes we've been checked and we declare victory and get the hell out of dodge. But every day this goes on, we see, in my opinion, advantage and power to the IRGC because they just look like they're winning.

I think it's clear that Trump miscalculated this situation quite horrifically. Just to be a logic, like, you don't have to be a genius to look at what he's saying and see the contradictions, the constant contradictions week over week. And the big one he's now got himself trapped in is he was handing out a six week timeline at the start of this and we're approaching six weeks. So if you watch this press conference from yesterday, he is incredibly irritated because all the journalists are saying, you said six weeks, it's six weeks. And it for the first time, there's a real measurable contradiction in what he said at the start versus now. And so if you watch it, he's so he's so agitated. He's calling the report as a disgrace. I think in this press conference yesterday, he personally insulted around 10 journalists. He's crashing out. He's crashing out.

Yeah. And for me, that was going to have this guy's lost. But I find the most interesting thing about this, one of the most interesting thing is someone who follows the markets. If you didn't know there was a war in Iran that threatens geopolitical, I don't know, safety, world oil flows. Yeah. If you looked at the market, would you know? No. The market just hit an all time high in the US. And again, it goes back to something very unhealthy. And that is, there's certain elements of our economy, specifically the wealthy that have totally disassociated from they can't feel it. The pump. Do you feel it? No. So 50% of consumers spending the US is a top 10%. The top 10% don't give a shit of gas as it six bucks a gallon. It doesn't matter.

Young poor people, lower income people spend 22% of their household income on energy. And when energy prices are going up, it really impacts them. So unfortunately, we begin outsourced the downside of war to less wealthy nations who are very oil dependent to the Gulf, which is incurring damage here. But America is somewhat sequestered other than reputational risk and who gets elected president. We're somewhat sequestered. Again, we've outsourced the pain to military families, to people who spend a disproportionate amount of their income, lower income households on energy. But it's somewhat dangerous that the most powerful people in the world, into a certain extent, the most powerful nation in the world, seems to be unaffected by some of these, by some of this. We stock certain all time high. This is something that I've made for you.

I've realised that the Diavitio audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learnt is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable, because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So, what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries. And we've released these last year and they all sold out so. I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colours and to make some minor tweaks to the diaries. So now we have a better range for you. So, if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation that I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at the diary.com.

has come from AI CapEx. If that slows down, we're immediately in recession. That's such an interesting idea that if you're sat in China as a leader now, you go, do you know what, give Americans cheap AI and you'll kneecap their economy. 100%. That's what I would do. It doesn't make sense. It makes a lot of sense. I've heard a lot of founders get quite scared that there will be an economic crash in the next 12 or 24 months because of the over-investment in AI. Investors are going to start to realize that the returns just aren't there for a lot of these companies that have raised at 100 million valuation that on an idea and so the market will contract. If the market does contract, what does history tell us that the individual should do?

The person listening, they're not the average person in such a market because they're going to be laid off. If all this investor money suddenly contracts, investors go risk off. They might be laid off. Well, again, so Jamie Diamond was asked, what is the definition of a recession, and he said something that happens every seven years. Your generation isn't used to a recession. No. I was on the board of the New York Times and within like 60 days, 70% of our revenues went away. 2008, the credit crisis, advertisers, 70-80% of the New York Times revenue was advertising. In May, we're doing X million in revenue, and then you joined the board, amen.

No, I think I joined the board. I joined them one day because it's exactly the wrong time. I raised a quick story. I raised 600 million to become the largest child in the New York Times and overnight, I turned it into 200 million. That was a learning experience for me. Anyways, just about the time I started having kids, God, that was stressful. Anyway, they basically within 60 days lost 70% of their out of revenue, and we had to go and find a Mexican billionaire to basically call some to bail us out. Your generation really doesn't know what a recession looks like. Everything stops. Imagine 70% of your subscription and advertising revenue from one month to one month declines. What would that do to your business? You'd have to consider letting people go, and you'd have to cut costs. But here's the thing, to a certain extent, it's healthy.

You start developing all these fatty deposits, and the best time to start a business is coming out of a recession, because people are cheaper, things are cheaper, people have a new way of looking at stuff, and also for your generation. People don't realize, I mean, quite frankly, if I'm a 28-year-old who's talented and doesn't have kids and dogs yet, I think a recession that takes down the asset prices might not be the worst thing in the world that happens to your generation. Because when O8 crashed, when there was the crash of O8, we let the banks fail. We bailed out the banks, but we didn't bail out the economy, and I was coming into my primary converting years.

It was in my early 40s, and I was still lucky enough and talented enough to make good money. So what did I get in 2009? Amazon Apple and Netflix for 8, 10, and 12 bucks a share. Those companies have 20x'd. We don't let anything fail, though. We bail out the markets. Where do you and your colleagues find value? What's cheap right now? Where do you find value? And here's the thing. There's two parts of your life from a financial standpoint. There's investing, part of your life, and there's harvesting. You're in the investing part of your life. There's a certain advantage to getting to invest when asset prices are low.

There's nowhere for you to find value. I'm pretty comfortable saying Apple and video aren't going to 20x from here. Where do you find value? Real estate? What Brooklyn is $3,000 a square foot? So while you're in the investing part of your life and you can survive a bit of a shock, I don't know if quite frankly, a good thing to happen for your generation wouldn't be a correction in asset prices because the economy has an unbelievable malleability and resilience to reform, reshape, and come back. Recessions usually don't last longer than 18, 24, 36 months. And I think a correction in asset values would be good. But what we decided, the leadership of my generation has decided we'd rather pull out your credit card and artificially prop up the markets through deficit spending or bailouts. They're talking, we mentioned Spirit Airlines.

They're talking about a $500 million government loan to Spirit Airlines to bail them out. That's nothing but you transferring money to me. Because who owns shares in Spirit? People my age. Who's trying to buy shit for cheap people your age? It should be allowed to go out of business. It should decline in price. Asset value should go down. When we bailed out every baby boomer owner of a restaurant or a small business in COVID, that just robbed opportunity from the new graduate of a culinary academy who wanted her shot to go buy a restaurant for pennies on the dollar. Everyone in my generation has had those asset dips where if you were resilient and coming into your prime income earning years, you could buy assets for a lower price.

We've decided that the government is here to bail my generation out and smooth out. Our assets make sure that our assets never go down by too much. All that does is rob opportunity from your generation. You wrote this book, The Anvil to Proof Well for simple formula for success. Brilliant, brilliant book. Linking to what you were just saying there. Where are you investing now? If you're a young person that's trying to defend your money or just really anybody at any age that's trying to find a place to put your money where you'll make a return, I guess there's actually two questions here which is the investing part and they're like, how do I set myself up just to make more money? Especially if there's going to be an economic collapse, things might get a little bit uncertain. I think I heard you say before that less people are leaving their jobs. It's harder for entry-level people to get into to newer roles potentially at the moment. So in such a world where there is uncertainty and I want to make sure that I don't go broke. I have $10,000 let's say and I want to make sure I increase my earning potential. What's one's advice for those dual strategies? Well, I'll tell you what I'm doing. So in it's different. I'm at a point where I'm not looking to go rich. I'm looking to

not get poor. So I just diversify like crazy. I don't invest more than 3% of my net worth in any one thing. And I'm diversifying out of the US market in the Latin America and European markets because the reality is nobody knows. The only kevlar against the unknown which is everywhere is diversification. Now a younger person can take more risks. Where am I doing? I'm diversifying and I'm investing in Pokemon because I do it with my son and he loves it and I think collectibles are actually the only place where there's value right now. Everything to me just looks crazy over value. I look at everything and think that's going to get cut in half. Oh, that's going to get cut out. But you always want to be in the market. It's very hard to be a stock picker. So if you're your age, you're a talented entrepreneur. You're investing in yourself. There's no ROI like finding a business you're good at, trying to invest and working your ass off. That's how you get wealthy in this for young people in this generation or you find a company that's going fast. You do well there. You get stock options. But the key is to make sure that a certain amount of your income never comes into your hands. People your age can't save money. If they get $100, they'll spend 105.

So the key is to find every matching program or every vehicle or hack to make sure you never see the money. And from an early age, it goes into low-cost index funds. Take 30% of your capital and have fun with it by the video, whatever you want. Do you think you're smarter than everyone else? And then you're going to find out you're not in the market outperforms you. But how do you get rich? The only answer I have is slowly. And that is figure out a way to make sure that money every month is invested in low-cost index funds. In terms of trying to pick the next big thing, oh, Christ, your guess is as good as mine. I just don't. And anyone who tells you they know doesn't know. So I know how to get your rich. That's a good news. The bad news is the answer is slowly and it requires some discipline. But people your age just find out a way to start saving when you're a teenager, $25 a month, ending your 20s, $100, and $500, and a thousand. And regardless of whether you have a platinum record or a best selling book or a podcast empire, you're going to be fine.

But I don't. I can't look at a sector and say, oh, it's AI. AI is overvalued right now. I don't know. Your job is to find something you're good at to focus, such that you can be great at something, which commands margin, to show some discipline, save some money, to diversify like crazy, and then to let time take over. Because I look at you and I think, oh, I'm like, Steven, I'm a young entrepreneur. And then I look at the mirror and I'm like, fuck. And I'm like, oh my god, I'm five years from death. It goes, but it happened in a blink. So take advantage of that. Because if I gave you a magic box and said, if you put, like, you're making real money now, if you put $100,000 in a box, by the time you're my age, it's going to be worth a million bucks.

And imagine that that that that box is like a second, 100,000 in a second, it's a million dollars. This to this feels like a second. So how much money would you put in that box? So the moment you have some capital, just think about trying to, at a young age, show some discipline and put some money in that box. Because it just compound interest is just it's staggering the power of it. But trying to predict where you should invest other than investing in yourself, additional skills, certifications, investing in relationships, trying to do as many nice kind things for other people. I think that compounds, especially when you're younger, people remember people who helped them when they were younger and maybe not that powerful. Imagine you're very low. The person who gave you $5,000, do you resent the money they make? They made? No. I actually emailed them this weekend. It's called Alistair thanking him again, sent him a big letter because that person took a chance on you.

I was just trying to make a kindness there, right? It wasn't even the 5,000. It was that a smart person said, I believe in you. I believe in you. And that meant that I could go over to my mother who was ignoring me and saying, look, the smart person believed in me. And therefore it made me believe in myself. That's really the investment they made. That's everything. And they took a chance and that probably was, they wanted a return, but what they wanted to do was help out a young man. If those people, your opportunity to make those investments as a young person, whether it's helping someone get a job, being kind, a kind word, a context, telling them how impressive they are, whatever it might be, that stuff. It's like investing. It compounds and you wake up at 50 and you find those relationships are really powerful assets. So look, I don't have a silver bullet here. Save money, diversify, compound interest, invest in relationships early, those compound too. Well, the most important decisions you made that resulted in the biggest sort of wealth upside for you. And they could be any kind of decision. It's not like I invested in this, but just I don't know, philosophy and mentality and approach that when you look back on your

career, you go, it was that. That was the biggest step change in my money. Well, my superpower is, I've gotten shot in the face a couple times personally and professionally and I mourn and I get up and I go try and raise money again and start another company. I had an e-commerce incubator. It was basically out of business six months from starting it. My e-commerce company that went public in 2002 went through restructuring, which is a fan who worked for bankruptcy in 2008. I started a video delivery company that went out of business. So I mean, you know, people talk about their successes. I think, generously, I'm sort of like three, four and two. I've had more losses than wins. Every time I've been rejected from a school, I had my affections were returned from a potential romantic partner. I got fired. I had a company go out of business. I had investment. I've always been able and I think this is a key skill. I think you have to do whatever you need to do, whether it's be around people who care about you, exercise.

You have to be able to stand in front of a metaphorical mirror and go, I can add a lot of value to a company. I can raise money again and start a business if I need to. I can make someone really happy. That's been my superpower. So the seminal moment in my professional success was a willingness to say, okay, I just got shot in the face. The whole world says I'm a failure because my business, I raised a ton of money and I had to call my investors and say we're shutting down. That's humiliating. It's public failure. I mourn and then I go out and I raise more money and try another company because only one in seven businesses succeed. So I started nine.

And I knew at some point, if you work hard enough, I mean, you can't guarantee success, but so much of it is out of your control. You just want to step up to the plate as many times as possible. You want to have a great swing. You want to be in shape. You want to be a good person. But a lot of it is resilience. I have a lot of really talented friends who came up through the alternative investments community. Masters of the universe making one, two, three million bucks a year working for hedge funds in the nineties and the odds. And then they went out on their own raised a bunch of money, hit some bumps and then close their funds or they had a business. I have friends who are entrepreneurs who left a good job and started a business and they get stuck. These are people who've never known anything but success. They got into an Ivy League school. They got a great job. Everything has been this. And then they hit a failure and they just get they lose their mojo. They just get stuck.

They can't get over it. They lose the confidence to go out and raise more money. And that's the key. The key to success is getting shot in the face and then just getting up again. I'm 30 years old. How do you score? I'm 61. You're actually 61. No, I'm lying. Yeah, I'm 61. It's the test asked around therapy. No, I thought I didn't think you were 61. I appreciate that. I thought you were 62 on November. If you'd said to me anywhere between 49 and 61, I think I would have believed you. So I'm sorry, let me take that out. I'm 49. What is it that you're 61. I'm 33. What is it that I don't know as a 30 year old that I'm going to find out in the next 30 years that I should know? What is the most important thing that I should know about the next 30 years? Nothing's ever as good or as bad as it seems. You've raised a ton of money. You're on fire right now. Be humble because a lot of this is now is out of your control.

If there's AI dumping in the US or this war gets out of control and the market shuts down, this goes away. Yeah. And it's not your fault, but nor is your success. So when things are going really well, be really humble and invest a lot of other people and realize be careful not to believe your own press. In 1999, my company was going public. I was looking at Jats. I just thought I was a man. It was very kind to my ex-wife. I really thought a lot of myself. And I credited my character, my grip, for my success without crediting enough to how lucky I was that I was in the right place at the right time. So be humble when you're successful.

At the same time, when you fail, and I failed a lot, realize a lot of that is in your fault too. And forgive yourself and move on. So a lot of your success and a lot of your failures in your fault. And when you look back on your life, when you look back on the biggest disappointments, in my senses, I don't know much about you, but my senses, you haven't had a lot of tragedy or real disappointment, at least professionally. It feels like it's been upward for you. When you look back on the most disappointing things that happened to you in this decade, you're not going to be disappointed about the thing that happened. You're going to be disappointed about how upset you were. So forgive yourself and realize this will pass. Because at the end of life, people wish they'd allowed themselves to be happier. They think I wish I had not beat myself up over that breakup, over that loss of job, over that loss of money. They're upset about how upset they were, not about what actually happened. So nothing's ever as good as bad as it seems.

And to really try and embrace, and I didn't do this, embrace relationships. And that is, I got on a hamster wheel. I just never had enough money. I was my whole identity was professional. And from the age of 25 to 45, I don't think I established many healthy relationships. I just didn't invest in them. I was always good with friends. I was staying in contact, but I kind of woke up in my early 40s. I just decided I wanted to move to New York and not have any obligations. I got divorced. I didn't say left my friends, but I didn't have money. I was living like a caveman, just occasionally leaving for food or alcohol or a good time. And I liked having absolutely no obligations and no connection to anybody. I actually enjoyed it.

And then I realized I started reading a lot of literature on happiness and longevity. And I realized if I do this, I'll be dead of 55. Because I don't have any connection to anybody. And so I started investing in relationships, started making an effort to reinvigorate friendships, really started to think about thoughtfully about I want to be around people a lot more. I was becoming very much an introvert and isolated. I mean, and I was like a poorer version of Howard Hughes at some point. But so I would say really focus on as much as you can, relationships and investing in them, in your 30s. I mean, it's super rewarding or pays off. But more than anything, just forgive yourself.

I'm becoming that. Well, look, I didn't want to have kids. And I think you can be happy without kids. I kind of got forced into it. I was with someone who much higher character, much more attractive than me. And she decided she wanted that kids. And I said, I'm never getting married again. And she's called my bluff and said, we don't have to be married. Something else. Anyways, so I didn't want kids. But now, and this goes back to purpose, everyone talks about finding a purpose in the way I approached life, which was really screwed up, as I approached you from a capitalist standpoint. I want more out of this friendship than I'm getting. I want more out of this investment than I invested. I want to pay this employee less than the value they're creating. I saw everything as a transaction that I wanted to be on the right set of. And what I figured out is that finding your purpose is finding that thing that you can never get a real positive return on. What do I mean by that? I will never get a positive return from my children. There's, they're never going to be up at 2 a.m. worried about me. They are costing me so much money. I don't care how nice the senior home is that I'm putting them in. The amount of love, concern, and anxiety I feel over my

boys, it would be almost impossible for them to return that. And that's the point. I finally have something where I feel like that sense of purpose. The most loyal, proud Americans are veterans, because there's no way American really pay them back for leaving their families and risking their person. That's an unparalleled investment. They'll never get that investment back. But what they get back is purpose. And I didn't realize that finding something you were so passionate about, whether it was a nonprofit or saving dogs from kill shelters or getting involved in a woman's right to have bodily autonomy where you give so much that there's just no way you'll ever really get at the kind of tangible ROI. And what I realized is when you find that, that's your purpose.

And I didn't realize that. So having kids for me has given me purpose. I enjoy it, but that's my thing now. I realized that's my job as to over invest. It's not to measure it because I'm just not going to get that back. So for me, having kids has been my purpose. Also, building something with a partner is really rewarding. It's like you travel a lot. In evidently, I know this happens to you. I always get upgraded to the presidential suite when I'm alone. And it's like it doesn't happen. If you don't have someone to share with, it doesn't happen. And the most rewarding businesses, the most rewarding things in my life have been when you build something with a co-founder or you build something with a partner. And when you have kids who go up and down in terms of their health and well-being and they end up being good kids, which my kids are, and you've built that with somebody, that's immensely rewarding. It's like the most rewarding businesses I've ever had have been with co-founders where we build something together and it pays off. It's just so rewarding. And when you don't build something with someone else, when you build it on your own, it's like getting upgraded without anyone there. It's like

you didn't have a safe, a safe tree. So when I tell any man, there's never a good time to have kids. You want to be somewhat financially stable. That was my problem. The biggest source of stress in my life was when I had kids in OA when I went broke. I was hugely stressful. And I think you want to make sure you have not only a partner or a committee, but I didn't realize how important confidence was in a partner. Because once you have kids, it's like operating a pans or tank division. There's a lot of moving parts and you have to have a competent partner. But I think if you're economically somewhat secure and you have a competent partner, for me, I'm not going to tell anyone what to do. Having kids has given me my purpose, hands down the most rewarding thing I will ever do. That is the last thing I will think about when I die.

I see so much emotion in you when you talk about it. Your eyes are filled with tears as you start talking about your boys. Because I know a lot about you because I've interviewed you a couple of times, now I've read your books and so on. And I find that fascinating because I don't know what it is. I don't know where that emotion comes from because a lot of people sit here and talk about the kids. But the minute you started mentioning them and the impact they've had on you in terms of helping you find your purpose, I could see the emotion in your eyes. Well, there's some things that surprised me. One, I didn't fall in love with my kids.

I didn't love my kids when they first came out into the world. I felt a sense of responsibility and anxiety. I did not like having babies. I was able to be selfish up at that point. I didn't feel this immense level of love and support that you were supposed to. I fell in love with my boys. I was a slow incremental thing. For me, and I think everyone's a little bit different. The reason I'm just fascinated and obsessed with my older one is he's me. I look at him, you know, the bad skinny had in his junior year, it's scrawny six foot one 130 pounds. The way he laughs, I'm like, when I hug him, I'm hugging me at 17 or 18. It's like so rewarding. And that's why I love him so much. My second is a different species than me. I observe him with fascination because I can't get over the fact that I made that because he is so different than me. So I'm fascinated by him in just such a different way, right? My oldest is a pleaser. Used to come into the bedroom on a Sunday and get in bed with us and then stand up and say, let's make a plan.

And I'm like, where are the cameras? This is like a hall, this is like a backyard hallmarked film, right? My youngest is a terrorist assessing the household for vulnerabilities so we can strike when we're at our weakest. The only thing, one recommendation I make to anyone who has a kid have two because it's fascinating. The only thing I can guarantee when I meet someone with one kid, I'm like, okay, the only thing I know about the second is it will be entirely different. If you want to believe in nature over nurture, have two kids because they just could not be more different and it's fascinating. We just haven't treated our boys differently. We just have in birth order, whatever. There's something in the batter. First lady Obama, Michelle Obama said something to really struck with me. She said, they come to you. You know, I forget, I think you've had that guy on, the child psychologist guy. We think we're engineers and that we get to make the sheep. We know we're shepherds. We get to point them in the right direction. We get to pick what food they have, but they come to you. Oh my god, I've seen that and I like to think, I always thought that my kids were going to be super into World War II movies and CrossFit

because that's what dad is into and they just want to hang out with me. No, no, no. The reason I'm up at night looking at Pokemon cards is because my kid is interested in it and what you realize as a dad is if you want to be a good dad, you have to lean into their interests. I'm not fascinated by Pokemon. That's not something I will do once my kid is out of the house, but what you realize is you have to engage in their interests and get into it. It took me a while because I was very selfish to fully embrace that. I hated giving up my weekends. I'd like to have a fabulous brunch with interesting people. I liked going to St. Parts. All that went away and I resented it for a while and then there's a certain ease and relaxation that overwhelms who we were like, I'm not trying to be fabulous. I know what I'm doing this weekend. I'm going to some lame birthday party for four year olds and I'm taking my kid to the soccer game and there's a certain ease about it that's relaxing and liberating, building something with somebody, seeing the way they evolve is just fascinating, just fascinating. The things they start asking you and you find your purpose. I would recommend it to anybody, but I also want to be clear. It's not one size fits all. Some people

can be very happy not having it. So many of the themes we talked about today, especially at the end of this conversation are in your new book, Notes on Being a Man, How to Adjust the Masculinity Crisis, Build Mental Strength and Raise Good Signs. I've had so many of my friends, actually both men and women, talked to me about this book because I think so many of us have been looking for a roadmap on exactly these subjects. Notes on Being a Man. Some of the themes are here on the back about being kind, about being a good dad and how what that means, but a lot of the stuff you say about getting out the house and really attacking the world and who one should become in such a world. So I highly recommend anybody who's raising something, who is a son, who is a father, or just wants to understand what it is to be a good man in the modern world gets this book and I'm going to link it below. Thank you. It's been such a smash hit and it's really rare that some of my close friends will send me messages thinking about one particular friend about this book. I think it's a testament to the impact it's having on the world. So thank you for writing this. I know you took a long time to write this book because we talked about it a couple of times when we had conversations,

but it is finally here. Who's it for? I write with only one objective. I hope my sons read my stuff in 30 or 40 years and feel like they understand me and the world a little bit better. That's it. I use that as a means of trying to be fearless because there's so many comments and so many. They're such a narrative out there trying to shape your views around the orthodoxy that whatever your political innings are. It's pretty easy to be intimidated and to having a certain narrative. So I try to write as if no one's going to read up on my sons in 20 or 30 years. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question to the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is in one sentence, what is the most challenging setback you've experienced and what's the lesson you want to pass on to others?

That's easy. My mother dying and you can never tell your parents how much you love them too much. Forgive them and my mom died slowly, which is bad for her, but it was good for me because nothing went outside. What is the emotion you're experiencing? I miss my mom terribly. I'm a middle-aged man who hasn't gotten over the death of his mother. Why do my life? Raise me on our own, secretary salary, give me confidence. Is there a way to, you said you're a middle-aged man that hasn't gotten over the loss of his mother? Is there a way to? I don't want to. I think the receipts for love is grief. I hope my boys feel the same way about me. It hasn't gotten in the way of my life. It makes me be more bold with my emotions. Yeah, I don't. I used to see it as a problem. I went to grief counseling.

Now I see it as a, not a bug, but as a feature. The receipts for love are grief and anxiety, and so what I would tell every young person is I hope they have a lot of joy in the life. I also hope they have a decent amount of grief because that means they have people they love immensely. Hey, man. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Steve. Good to see you. Congratulations on your burgeoning empire. Jesus Christ, man. This is out of control. Every time I come here, I'm like, where are the helicopters? It's like pretty soon I'm going to see a nuclear tower power plant powering next to me. It's just amazing. You're like everywhere.

At one point, at one point, I was on, I was at the airport with my boys and I'm staring at this like 100 foot like testimonial to you. I'm like, make it. Stop. God, Jesus.