Scott Galloway: Why I'm selling my American stocks

Scott Galois, Scott Galois.

Scott Galois, you got away. He's a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business. The Howard Stern of the Business work. We have a little stick for you today. We want to ask you the 10 spiciest burning questions today that we had. Long time to give it to the animals. But far away, I am living large and I love it. I am so good at spending money. I spend money like a 50s canester just diagnosed with a scancer.

Scott, you want to get into the sucker? Mr. ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪ ♪ I put my all in it like the days on a bold list ♪

“I want us to do on me to be. Is there's a fan people, negative comments?”

Make it sure the people really believe I'm not running for president. They send my answers. Are we going to all stalls with no chip here? What are we doing? All right. So you did this post the other day, which was pretty hilarious. You said I finally know what it feels like to be an attractive woman. Because I met Davos and everyone's looking down at my chest and deciding if they're going to talk to me or not.

It was great. I loved your Davos stuff. You obviously said something amazing.

You were like, I don't even want to be here. I'd rather be at home with my kids. And I thought that was awesome. But what I want to know is when you're around all these incredibly successful people, people who are actually like in the Illuminati who had the most gravity towards them. Who were you drawn to? Oh, hands down, Governor Newsom. Wow. I walk down. There's this in the Congress hall. First off, I've been back to Davos in 27 years.

I peaked early. Like I came out of the gate strong and then divorced.com implosion. Great financial recession. My current sideways for 10 or 15 years. So it's taking me 27 years to get back to Davos. And I'm walking around and I'm like, I'm not running for office. I'm not raising money.

“I don't, I'm not pitching anything. Why the **** am I here?”

In my favorite moment, I walked down into the main area of Congress hall. Gavin Newsom was walking around like, I'm the president and everyone believed him. He had an entourage. He that guy has such star power. And this was the nicest moment for me because I'm desto for other people's affirmation. He's walking with an entourage. He spots me in the corner of his eye and it comes over to me.

He hugs me and he says, keep doing what you're doing. Governor Newsom has that star power. Hands down, star power on the other side of the spectrum. I saw this old man with a pod belly walking around desperate to find someone to talk to and no one was **** interested and it was Lindsey Graham and that gave me a lot of joy. Did you, you know, you're you're incredibly successful. You're incredibly influential.

But when you're at Davos, you're around like literally the people controlling the world.

The most famous, powerful people on earth. Was there anything that you learned?

I don't think I was able to discern differences or draw anything conclusions around these types of people. The thing that I walked away from Davos with is that the last time I was there in 1999, it was about e-commerce and the US brand was capitalism, consumption, and Bill Clinton. Now it's about AI, everyone was talking about AI, and it's about the American brand is chaos, coercion, and I don't know, compliance. I just, I find the US brand is pawned so far so fast.

I came away from Davos unsettled about how unsettled the world is right now. But I don't think I, Juni, I personally and people hate this. The billionaires I know, I know about it doesn't, are actually really good people. The Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, like, you can't be a billionaire unless you're a bad person. Well, okay, Elizabeth Warren, you were 20 million. Does that mean you're only a 50 as his bad,

but you're 20 times worse than a millionaire? I don't buy the rich people are bad. I have generally found that distinct of the Epstein files, which I understand, gives people the impression that once men get to this point, they feel like they're no subject to the rules. I think that's a really interesting discussion.

“I personally have found a billionaires are generally very high character people because the key to being really successful”

is to create allies along the way, such that you're put in a room of opportunities when you're not physically there. As well said, you, what was the line that knew some said, and should we all steal that line? Because I feel like that was the universal smooth guy line. Just going up to somebody and say, keep doing what you're doing. How does that not apply to any situation with anybody? I'm going to use that everywhere.

He seems so genuine. He, I've been on his pod. I know he likes me. I know my works had influence on him. He's doing this big initiative around boys and young men, but I got to be honest. It just felt great to have that sort of recognition. But oh my god, that guy is the definition, the manifestation of risk. Man, I saw about a, I saw him on like a basketball podcast.

It was him and like two or three black dudes and he was talking about like, he like, what do they call it? Code switching. It'd be like, sort of like, growing up with like mac and cheese or something like that. He's like, you have some wonder bread. They're like, wonder bread. He's like, yeah, man. And that clip went super viral. Like, you know, if you hate him, you're like, he's fake in the funk. If you like him, you're like, he's just being so real.

You know, that's how everything goes. He's, you know, he owned a, he owned a winery called Plum Jack. He's literally wider than Ted. The Ted conference. Like, that guy couldn't get any wider.

Hey, one quick thing. So Scott, as you can see in this episode has this ability to compress like 10 years of wisdom into one sentence.

It's almost hard to let it sink in. And so the team at HubSpot sponsored today's episode actually went through all four times that he's been on our show. It took all the best stuff and put it in one place. So anything he's talked about for wealth building, for power, for life advice, his predictions, what moves markets. It's dense. It's a document. It's available now.

“It's totally free. If you're ambitious and you enjoy hearing Scott's thoughts, I think you'll get a lot out of it.”

The link is in the description below. All right, back to this episode. Question number two. All right. This is a good one. You're a grown man. You got a hundred million dollars. You've got fame. You've got family. You've got influence. What is it that you're still hungry for? That money has not been able to buy so far? I want to launch good men.

I feel like I have a deficit. I think I've taken more from the country. You know, from taxpayers and from the freedoms I've enjoyed, then I've given back. So I want to get to a point of surplus value. And my purpose, my purpose is I want to raise good men. I want to know that when I'm towards the end, I've raised really confident loving men.

Did you always think in terms of purpose?

No. I mean, let me put this way. My purpose, I had two purposes. I wanted to be really (bleep) rich and really (bleep) awesome. So I could take care of my mom and be more attractive to strange women. That was my purpose the first 40 years of my life.

“So you have this perspective flip in your 40s. If you're influential to a bunch of guys today, who was that for you?”

Like who influenced you just kind of changed the way you were approaching things or shift your mindset or you know, change your approach to life? I've had a lot of male mentors in my life that, you know, they usually say one thing that really sticks with me. But the big pivot for me in my life hands down was when my mom got really sick and I couldn't take care of her. That just started changed everything for me and that was money as a means of protecting people, not of having an awesome life. And it just started changed everything for me because up until that point my life was prom, star wars, getting (bleep) up with friends.

And then this happens to everybody. I don't know if it's happened to the two of you. But when someone you know and love gets really sick or, you know, and loves you a great deal, good sick and dies, it just kind of for me. It kind of changed everything. And not necessarily in a good way. I still feel like, you know, I'm a middle-aged man who doesn't gotten over the death of his mother. And also, I mean, it sounds very pass-a but it's true. The death of my mother and the birth of my boys. And it wasn't a hallmark channel moment when my boys were born.

I'm like, "I need to make more money." And it was 2008. I'd lost everything. I just felt this, like, it wasn't angel singing and bright lights. By the way, I don't think men should be in the delivery room. It's (bleep) gross. Bring me the thing cleaned up with a bow in its hair while I'm smoking a cigarette. I think it's just so welcome stupid that they allow men into the delivery room. But anyways, I felt shame. I'm like, "I've been so successful. I've had so many blessings and I'm near broke and now I'm responsible for this little science experiment."

But it really rattled me. It was also very motivating. So, it's no one person. It was very birth and death as they're supposed to be. I've been the biggest influences on my life. That's a great answer. That's pretty awesome. Did you say you stopped worrying about making money in your 40s?

We talked about this. I decided that once I got to a number from 25 to 45, maybe 48, I did nothing but work. I did nothing but work. It wasn't a good person. I wasn't going out of my way to save the whales. I wasn't investing in relationships. I wasn't just like when, again, going back to my mom got sick and I couldn't take care of her. I was so traumatized by a capitalist society that doesn't protect people who are under-insured.

“I'm like, "The only thing I can control is how hard I work."”

And you can't decide to be economically secure, but you can decide how much of your own time and energy. I don't remember anything from the age of 25 to 45 other than working. There was a couple trips to Hawaii. I don't remember anything but working.

But I decided, all right, if I get to this number and the problem is your number keeps going up.

And we talked about this heading in the last podcast. I said, "When I hit this number, I'm done." And I'm going to do two things. Whenever I meet with my financial advisors and I do this once a year, they tell me, "This is your net worth." And if it's above that number, which it has been the last 12 years because it's been amazing economy, I do one of two things with the incremental number above that.

I either spend it. I love to spend money. I'm great at it. I am so good at spending money. I spend money like a 50s gangster just diagnosed with ass cancer. I am living large and I love it. Or two. And then anything above that, I give away. And I don't do it because I'm feeling anthropic. I do it because it makes me feel masculine and American.

I spend money like a 50s gangster who just got diagnosed with ass cancer.

I have to know. Is that a line you've ever said before? Did that just... Not more than two or three hundred times, Sean. That's a little bit of stuff for you. I mean, you are so realistic.

I was on Ben's, I was on Ben's, Stilar's podcast. And I said that and he was like, "Oh, did you know I actually had ass cancer?" I have my prostate removed. On comfortable pause. On comfortable pause.

Ben's been very public. He fought and beat prostate cancer anyways. Did he spend money lavishly when he had it? I don't know what his approach to money is, but I think that... Yeah, I think a finite nature of life or sense of that. I get that power from my atheism.

I think if you're... This is a point one percent problem, but I can't stand it. I have rich friends that don't know how to spend their money, or they don't give it away. It's like, "What the f*** you doing? Enjoy your life."

Well, that is question number three, perfectly needed. You said something that we thought was genius. We've talked about it many times. You said, "America is the best place to earn money and Europe is the best place to spend money."

And it got us thinking about spending money. What can we learn from you?

“We said, "What else is the best way to spend money”

to improve quality of your life?" What have you actually found is good bang for your buck, spend it, and improves quality of your life? Oh, we talked about a lot of money? Whatever comes to mind, what I say that, yeah, you can talk about it.

Oh, hands down on private plan, hands down. It lowers the bar for fun. You buy or you charter when you need it. I've owned a plan, that was a ton of fun, but it's a ton of work, because your pilots get divorced

and there's safety checks and all this bullshit. It's like managing a small business. Charter is difficult, because you end up comparing the prices and it's a lot of work. Hands down fractional's the way to go,

because you essentially can arbitrage scale up or down based on the mission. If it's just you flying somewhere, you don't want to belt so much shit into the air, so you go smaller plane.

If you're taking two families to India, which I'm doing, you get a big plan, and you basically just text them. Yeah.

It's about, I spent about one and a half or two million dollars a year,

but a friend of mine from high school, I really like Mormon kid getting married and a weird place. I'm going, why? 'Cause I have a (beep) private plane. I figured it out.

“I can spend another 17 days a year either with my family”

or doing something fun, because I'm not going to, I'm not connecting to Dallas for worth and getting delayed. I'm also a bit of a nervous flyer, but yeah, I mean, I hate to take my house. Don't take my plane.

It's there anything that your billionaire buddies spend on that you think is stupid and not worth it. Art and wine. Art is I'm trying to buy culture. I've been a (beep) boring douchebag my whole life,

so all of a sudden I'm going to start over spending on art and it makes me interesting. No it doesn't. You're still the same (beep) douchebag. What about something that's a good way to spend?

That's below the PJ, like threshold. Oh, travel. Do you have kids? Just go, you know, take them to Elf and camp in Bangkok. I go on safari.

What age did you start traveling with your kids? I've got a two year old and a three month old, and I'm looking forward to traveling. The three month old is actually easier to travel than the two year old.

Zero to three is off, it gets better. You're, you're no use, your job is to be supportive of your wife and make money. That's it. You have no value.

You'll pretend to like it. You'll come on podcasts and say, I love it. She did the cutest, it's awful. And keep them away from a large body of water. That's your entire job right now.

And then at about age three, they become less awful. And then about from like four to 14 is the golden decade. Oh, do everything.

I mean, again, these are incredible stories of privilege.

But even if you know how money, take your kid. Well, the best week I've had in probably last three years, I did college tour with my son. We planned it out together using AI. Should we go to Indiana?

Should we go to Washington? Should we go to Michigan State? What if we go to, if we go to Michigan? Can we see a football game? If we go to UNC?

Can we see a basketball game? I mean, we did nine schools and nine days. And it was just amazing. And, but take time with your partner. Take them somewhere cool in a may.

Spend. There's a ton of research on this. People overestimate the amount of happiness they'll get from things. And they underestimate the amount of happiness they'll get from experiences in some. Drive a Hyundai and take your husband and Africa.

That's awesome. You had a pretty bold thought last time that you were on.

“I think you said something where you predicted that America's decade.”

The next decade for America is going to be flat in terms of economic growth. And I think you also said for index funds. Do you still believe that to be true? Yeah. I'm selling down my American stocks.

Mostly because I'm diversifying because I don't want to lose. I've lost all. I've been rich three times between. So I've lost a twice. I can't go back.

I'm not. You guys are young and have good hair. I'm neither. Neither of those things. I can't make it back again.

So I'm diversifying.

It's typically the US outperforms for eight years. Then emerging markets outperform for eight years. It goes back and forth. We've been outperforming emerging markets for 17 years. I still believe the markets are cyclical.

The Buffet Index stock market valuation versus GDP. He likes it at about 90%. It's a 210%. The S&P is trading at historic highs. 97% of the time.

The S&P has traded at lower valuations relative to earnings. So it's not a criticism of America. I just think America is an asset. At the rest of the world is an asset. There's America as an asset.

Everything. Every public company in America. Every public company outside of America. They're equally priced right now. They're both.

You can own every public company in America for a hundred bucks. Or you can own every public company outside of America for a hundred bucks. What do you think is the better value right now? I mean, that's a leading question.

But I would have always assumed America.

Oh, so I think it'd be take. Okay. Every public company in China, Europe, Latin America.

“You think is worth less than the public company in America?”

Yeah, I think I think like I think that when you look at the S&P, I think that the big American companies to me aren't American companies. They are. Well, they're in Ashman. That's fair.

That's fair. That's still like Apple's not an American company. It has its major office in Cupertino. But I don't think of it as an American company at this point. That's that's I think that's a thoughtful response.

Yeah. I think America's too expensive right now. I think Europe's on sale. And by virtue of the fact that I am an American, basically, the majority of my advertisers,

I'm always going to be very invested in America. Because I don't know much about real estate in America. And my company is largely driven by American human capital and American advertisers.

So what I'm trying to do is, I think the most powerful word I didn't learn until I was in my 40s was diversification.

I just think America's expensive right now. It's not even a statement on the judgment on America. American companies. I just think America's overvalued right now. Do you want to hear some of the other predictions that you made in our podcast?

And we went and looked if they were right or wrong. You said Apple was overvalued.

“I think we did this podcast eight months ago.”

You said Apple was overvalued. You were right. I think the stock went down since them. You said that we, what did you say? You said that the GLP ones were going to be bigger than GPT-4.

I believe you were right there. I think the GLP one market cap. I think there's like a GLP one index. I think as grown faster than Chad GP or OpenAI's evaluation. You said M RNA stocks are going to decline.

And I think you got that correct big time. But down is up 90 percent. Yeah, yeah. It's down. And then you also said that, but here's the interesting one.

You said that food. You thought that food stocks because of GLP ones were going to be down. And McDonald's is not down. I think, but I think you like made a prediction that you thought that GLP ones would be so big. That big Donald's were going to go down.

I think GLP one is a more transformative technology than AI. I've said this for a couple years. So Sean, we were talking about microdosing or whatever it is. I'm going to assume you are microdosing GLP one drugs. Let me ask you, what's had a bigger impact on your life?

GLP one drugs or AI? I don't microdise. What do you mean? I don't microdise. Yeah, if you want.

So I can't. Well, I just assumed since I've seen you, you're fit in trim. Which I assume means you're on the govy. But we'll go with the notion. You're just getting just Gavin Newsier.

You're just, by the way. By the way, I don't take ED drugs. Just you know, I don't. I don't. I absolutely, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't, I don't take.

I don't take Viagra before it's go time every four Sunday. During the summer solstice, when my partner agrees to have sex with me, I absolutely don't take Viagra. Anyways, let me ask you this then more broadly. If someone is on a GLP one and they're using AI all the time,

what do you think has a bigger impact on their life? For sure, the GLP one. That fast is way to deficit reduction. If I could be president for a day or king for a day, I'd imagine that I'm a magic wand mandatory national service.

Let me say that right now. $25 per minimum wage, but the third thing I would do, I would put out the mother of all RFPs, the novenor disk, Eli Lilly and say, I need a billion doses of GLP ones. And then I would distribute it for free to every rural household in America.

And I would take healthcare costs from $13,000 to $6,500 and boom, we have a deficit solved. GLP one is the most transformative technology of the last 20 or 30 years. It's a biggest thing since GPS is the way I say it. That is a wild take.

“That's what we were going to actually ask you.”

If you were in charge for a certain amount of time, and you could make wave of magic wand, what would you do? And you just answered that question. I never, it's very interesting.

I never to million years thought you were going to say that.

Do you feel like the data's out on, you know, either long-term effects, the downsides of it, or are you saying, doesn't really matter. We can decide as so big that we can, we can figure out how to mitigate the downsides.

Oh, I mean, I'm not a scientist. We might find out that 30 years down the road, people are getting pancreatic answer. But generally speaking-- It's been gallowy. You just ordered a billion doses.

Generally speaking, whenever the AIDS cocktail was worth it, but it ended up giving people or on a cholesterol problems. Chemotherapy is amazing. You do enough of it. You're going to get leukemia in 20 or 30 years. There's just no free lunch.

I'm a much better version of me, a little f*ck up. I love alcohol. I've got more out of it and it's got an out of me. There's definitely not a free lunch on alcohol. So far, everything we keep learning about GLP1 is that,

oh, it's even better than we thought. It makes you live longer. It might delay cognitive decline. It's optimal gambling addiction. It's a poor addiction.

People are biting their nails less. Have you taken it? No. I'm my microdose at some point. I'll be the giddy pick here. I had drinking in drug issues.

I've been sober for a long time. You came on here. You came on the podcast, like, what? Four years ago. It was a funny, I think.

It was 21. Yeah, basically five years ago. He told me about something he read in a reddit forum and he injected into his body. This was before the trend.

And he's like, this thing is amazing.

He's like, yeah. I'm losing weight. He's like, but I also, I don't have any cravings. You told me, you said on the podcast,

“you go, I think this is going to cure alcohol.”

What technology tells you to stop eating ice cream and eat more kale? Well, okay. So I, I've been sober for 12 years or so, but when I took it five years ago, I was like, you know what's crazy?

As I walked by a brewery the other day. It's sometimes when I walked by a brewery, and I smell like hops. Because I've really smelled it in the middle of the day. I'm like, oh, that's amazing.

I wish I was there. I remember smelling it. And I was like, I don't wish I, like, I don't want to go there and like drink this stuff. And then I remember eating like a scoop of ice cream

or just a bite of ice cream. And I was like, that was lovely. I don't want it anymore. I'm done. And then I also bit my nails less.

It was a magical drug. It was a very magical drug. And people like me, I'm a fairly fit person. I don't know if it's entirely. It's, it's not necessary for people like me.

But if you're obese, I think it's, it's really amazing. But yeah, I, and I, and I, and I'll microdose it every once in a while because I just think it's interesting.

And there's always like a new varieties.

You know, it's like getting the latest and greatest car. There's all these like new varieties that are just like wild. It is pretty amazing.

“I think met four men's really interesting too.”

But there's a bunch of these drugs, man. They are pretty crazy. I, I think it's, I, I'd give that out. I really enjoy this president thing. I would eliminate capital gains and market interest rates.

I'm, I need to correct myself. We said dictator. You're dictator. Oh, better. Much better.

So, so this is a, if you have a benign, the best friend country's in the world. Are you Singapore? It's a benign dictator. Like, if you get a good, good dictator, that's absolutely the way to go. You could argue the China in a lot of ways.

I mean, we hate anything that's not democratic. I get it. The weavers, a lot of people describe she is a murder of sodocrat. The life expectancy 40 years ago in China was 47. It's now 77.

They brought 500 million people out of poverty into the middle class.

You could argue that China has pulled off something so incredible. Anyways, I would do get rid of capital gains tax, deduction, market interest rate, who owns homes and stocks. People my age. Young people.

You're going to capital gains, you're a complex person, man. You don't fall into one category. Why would you do that? Because every fiscal policy we've made over the last 50 years is to transfer money from people our age to people my age.

We have slowly but surely old people have figured out a way to vote themselves more money. And the average 70 year old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. And the average 25 year old is 42% less wealthy.

“And what do you know, young people aren't having kids in a fed up with America?”

We are constantly over investing in seniors. But how does that tie to the capital gains? Because don't don't older people own the assets that would benefit from no capital gains tax. No, no, I'm sorry. What I mean is they pay current income.

They don't get a tax deduction. There should be one, it should be Reagan. There should be one income tax rate for all income you make. And by the way, anyone under the age of 30, like Portugal should have a tax holiday for the first 100,000 dollars.

We desperately need to level up young people who don't like America. And have mandatory national service such that they start meeting other great Americans. The tech holidays are great idea. We need to level up. I mean, it's pretty simple.

We need to put more money in the pockets of young people and stop transferring 1.2 trillion dollars from young people to the wealthiest generation in the history of planet old people. Old people are basically raping our economy for the last 30 or 40 years and needs to stop. Okay. And what do you know?

Our Washington D.C. is a cross between the Golden Girls and the Land of the Dead. And they keep voting themselves more money. 40 billion dollar child tax credit that would benefit young families stripped out of the infrastructure bill. But the 120 billion dollar cost of living adjustment for social security flies right through enough already. So you haven't really thought about that question ever before.

Yeah. Like Governor Newsom likes me. You're talking about things that mean Sam don't know about. So we're going to shift it to things we understand. Okay.

Okay. So you've talked about question five is you've talked about how there's just male loneliness in the pandemic. And he talked about like policy changes or self motivated and high agency changes that the individual can make. What's the business opportunity around the sort of young lost male epidemic?

The first thing that comes to mind is third places.

I think you're going to see. You're already saying a massive uptick. And unfortunately a manifest itself because there's a monopoly taken master in ticket prices to go see Taylor Swift or. You know, whoever it is. But I think third places. I think we need more bars. I think we need more sports wigs.

I think we need, you know, touch shack, wave garden. It top golf. I think we should provide subsidies to third places. I also think we need to unlock. I think developers in the US.

I think you're going to see a huge counter cyclical movement against Nimbilas. And that the government will probably come out with subsidies. And we're in control makes no sense. That just makes housing more expensive because you limit supply. We need instead of drill baby drill to be build baby build. I think the development companies are going to get government sponsored subsidies to encourage them to build more.

And we're going to start doing away with Nimbilas.

“That's what they've done in Minneapolis, what they've done in Austin.”

But housing has gotten way too expensive for young people for the entrance. And I think that being few of the investment developers right now, or great third places where people meet. I think that's a way to make money. Unfortunately, I hate to say it. The guys who are going to clean up here are the guys tapping into young men's worst instincts.

You're going to see the speculation markets boom. Gaming is out of f*** control because if you're a 19 year old dude in a French class at Cal State Northridge, it'd just be more fun to bet on whether the next pitch is going to be 90 miles an hour greater. The most profitable companies are going to be the ones tapping into an immature, prefrontal cortex of an American male. So unfortunately, the way to make money off the loneliness epidemic is probably meta because they're exploiting it.

In terms of how to solve it, I think that's more public policy. I'd like to think there's a great way to make money doing it. But unfortunately, all the profit incentives around making young men lonely or lonely are. Didn't you use to own like a social club in New York? Did I remember that correct?

No. I'm a member of all of them. I go to all of them. My general investment philosophy is the following. The sex here it is.

I want to join. I won't get near it with a check.

“A friend of mine is opening a members club in downtown Manhattan for musicians and artists.”

Sounds amazing. I went great opening party people. I need to be the oldest lease attractive person wherever I am. Then I know him at the right place. And this was that.

So I joined. He asked me to be a best. I'm like, no way. No way. Another friend of mine is starting a SaaS platform for healthcare maintenance scheduling.

Working there sounds like I want to put a gun on my mouth. Take my money. The more boring and less sexy and investment is. That's where you invest. The other shit you consume.

But you know an investment in it. Your turn on your invested capital is inversely correlated to how sex and cool in industry sounds. You're your big career win was L2 which you know that's. I started watching you years and years ago and L2 because you would do numerous new analyses amazing YouTube videos.

I think I never to be honest.

I never understood exactly what L2 was. I didn't know if it was like a consultancy or software. But it was basically helping brands look at different data to decide where they rank and how what they need to do to improve. But you made that. I mean that on paper does not sound exciting.

You made it pretty sexy and cool. I loved watching your YouTube videos. That was pretty awesome. Being generous was digital benchmarking where we used software and scraping tools to get our degree of 1200 data points on a brand and then we compare them to their peers. Ooh.

Make it mean we could. We could my knees just to say that. Oh yeah. It's because you like money. But yeah that.

And then recurring revenue model. You know, we had an ultimately ended up selling for eight times revenue. So when I was doing strategy consulting which sounded much cooler.

I would charge William Snomer or Levi's half a million bucks to do there.

Internet strategy and they're like two thirds of the way through the engagement come up with new problems. It only I could solve so they would pay me more. But the recurring revenue, international benchmarking, you know, digital. You know, I think it sounds cool. I like that stuff.

But I want to be quarterback of the chat. That sounded much cooler to me when I was in high school. I didn't think I'd be in digital benchmarking. So our analytics. But yeah, the the less sexy and industry the greater the return on your human financial capital.

I live in San Francisco. And in the last four years, the most sexy thing to be investing in this AI. And my biggest investment has been put millions and millions of dollars into retail shopping centers. Which if you walk around San Francisco, anybody here will tell you. That's dead.

What are you talking about? People don't go to brick and mortar stores anymore.

“I think that's what going to be a great investment.”

But it's been phenomenal. Like I'm a great investment. Basically compounding like 44% a year. And I get the tax benefits of real estate and it's passive and I don't like it. It's like retail, which everyone thinks is dead.

There's I think less than 4% vacancy rates like nationally. Simon properties. Nobody builds anymore. It's a supply constraint. And so, you know, my investor updates are not about AI.

It's about how Burlington co-factory signed extended their tenure lease.

And it's been the least sexy, but the most profitable investment I made. All of my venture investing is giving me zero cash flow. And, you know, sort of zero returns because it's this 10 year arc. Whereas boring shopping centers has crushed it for me. Yeah, I mean, there's some nuance there.

“Because I think the tier two models were struggling.”

But the, yeah, I mean, somewhere in violin agreement.

Well, actually one of the things you said about third place is has actually shown up to true.

So the one thing that died was like. Macy's or like, you know, about. A bunch of neighborhoods, these for Joe hands and things like that. But they all get replaced with experiential things. So it's trampoline parks.

It's top all. It's, you know, things like that that are experiences that people want to go do. And so you're seeing anybody who understood that can look at a center that has vacancy or attended on the way out. But you can, there's tons of demand for these experiential things to fill up.

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And this is our next question. But you said, uh, you talked about how important it is. Both financially and emotionally to marry the right person. So if we were going to do the, the, the inversion of that, what would you say is the best and easiest way to marry the wrong person?

It's a really thoughtful question. Um, when I was a young man and I was trying to find romantic or sexual partners. I was constantly trying to figure out what person do I need to be that will get them to like me. I was trying to constantly figure it out. Do I need to act indifferent?

Like I don't care. I, uh, I was just, I wasn't me establishing a relationship with this person or on a day with this person. It was my representative who tried to figure out what I thought this person would want from me. Or specifically how I could convince this person to have sex with me. And what you realize is the person you want to end up with is the person where you get to be you

and they like you despite the real you. Like, and the best relationships I've ever had are people that like I can be me around. And they just really like me for me. I, I, I look back on sources of confidence. My first serious relationship with the woman they melanicate again.

And I was crazy about her and she was crazy about me. And I think that confidence of someone who actually knows you. And you can be honest with and call and who sees your insecurities and, you know, and still really is in to you. I just think I, if I could wish anything on a young person, it would be the opportunity to be who you are around somebody. And find out that people, there are people out there who will love you for that.

I just think that I didn't figure that out. I was constantly trying to put on a mask of who I thought would be the most attracted or interested in me. And bragging and boasting. And, and also, I think the ultimate weapon, the ultimate Aphrodisiac for young men to give to women is this strange thing called follow-up questions. For me, it was always controlled boasting.

And to actually just take an interest in someone's life and notice them, I found was really powerful later in my life. I would also recommend probably being very careful about getting married young. I think you're a different person at 32 than you are at 22.

I would always suggest living together first to see what it's like to have that kind of roommate.

“I think you need to get alignment around money.”

I've been in best manner for weddings and I get the same toast every time and it's a sincere toast. There are three things to assist being a successful husband. The first is, but the scorecard away. Decide what kind of husband, son, friend, partner, investor you want to be. Hold yourself to that standard. Don't keep score.

I've kept score in my whole life with relationships that's been a disaster for me because you will naturally inflate your own contribution and minimize theirs. And you always feel unhappy. Decide the kind of person you want to be, hold yourself to that standard. To always express physical and sexual desire. Sex says an affection whether it's holding a hand or fooling around with your partner in the bathroom at a party.

It says, "I choose you, I want you." I think women want to be wanted. And I just think that animal instinct expressing desire is super important in a partnership and I think it's a wonderful thing.

I think we're physical beings and the third thing is never ever let a woman be cold or hungry.

Tasminas and power bars wherever you are. You are just so full of soundbites like the best effort these the acting of a woman is a follow-up question.

the way that you got silent and we're slow to answer, I was like, nice.

He's never talked about it this way and where it gets something totally fresh.

“But then you say these phrases where I'm like, "How on earth do you come up with this stuff?”

It's really, it's really, really good." John and I were talking about Eddie Murphy and he was like, "I'm a good comedian because I'm sensitive." I'm very sensitive to details and I see things that maybe other people don't see and I just notice things and I am able to talk about them and it makes everyone laugh because it's something that they all notice but they're not exactly sure that they're sensitive enough to really comment on it. What allows you to think to come up with these interesting observations is it being sensitive? What is it?

It's mostly IP theft. I get most of my ideas from other people and I'll pause when I see something really interesting or the kind of moves me. And I'll repeat it a bunch of times and try to apply it so it's had to remember it. I've just found this thing, I forget it we even said it but it really moved me and it was that everything does not demand your judgment. You're entitled to not have opinions on things.

And I just paused and I thought about it over and over and over and over and I've used that line a bunch of times because I was falling into this trap of done in Krueger. I thought, "Okay, because I have some insight around a couple things that everyone demands to deserve and wants my opinion on everything." And I do all these hot takes on the podcast and videos and you know, it's like the obscene pause come out and I'm like, "All right, how do I wrap my hands around that?" And I'm like, "You know what? Maybe the world isn't dying to hear from me about the obscene pause."

Maybe the world isn't dying to hear about my views on Iran although I have a lot of views on Iran. It's okay, it's okay to occasionally sit back and just shut the f*** up. Anyways, my point is if I see something that I find really insightful and interesting, I stop, I read it a bunch of times, I try to cement it into my gray manner.

“So I don't think I'm that insightful, I think I'm good at identifying thoughtful ideas.”

And I try to reference where I got the idea from but there's so much amazing material out there.

It seems like you pay attention to what resonates better than most, what resonates with yourself. I think that's kind of like the Eddie Murphy sensitivity idea also, but it does seem like there has to be either an incredible knack for just nailing it, putting the words around it right away or an intentional effort to kind of punch things up. I guess like, how do you arrive at the the kill shot that you have at the end? Right? You've said 10 of them on this podcast already.

And you know, in some ways, we're asking Steph Curry to tell us how to shoot a jump shot, but like, do you do anything that you think the average person doesn't do to be better at that?

Well, first of all, you're being generous. I got a wrong a lot.

I'm not saying you're right. I'm saying you're lyrical. I think you're very persuasive. I say really stupid things all the time, and you know, in my comments section, well, remind me of that all the time. I get a wrong a lot. I don't know if it's 49 or 50, it's two things. I don't know if it's 49 or 51% genetic. My father was really a gifted storyteller. And he was a salesman. He had a Scottish accent, a big strong drier line, and I just noticed from the age of eight that people would create a semi circle around him just to listen to him. He just had it. He was just an amazing storyteller and a lot of my ability to communicate it's not my fault.

And then you may have a great swing naturally, but if you don't take lessons every day and play four hours a golf, you're not going to be tired with it. And I'm not at that same level, but I'm like a guy who just got his, you know, amateur program card. I get to speak for 22 years. I've speaking front of 160 students paying $180,000 per class to listen to me talk about something. I'm on podcast every day. I write several thousand words a week about a concept and really trying to understand it. I have a group of analysts who find data.

So I'm practicing golf for hours a day. There's no certain Michael Phelps is in the pool six hours a day from the age of five.

“You have to, and by the way, he has naturally huge webed feet that are not his fault, right?”

I think if there's one secret sauce to communicating, is that if you can write well, you're going to be a decent communicator, and I got to see an English in high school, but I've never stopped writing. So again, it's some some genetics, some hard work, some practice. Can you actually tell us when do you find time because I'm so, Prof. Galway.com. No mercy no malice is the blog, which I read I love. And so you just wrote up two blog posts this week or in the past two weeks actually. What's that? What's the total volume? So it's like two news letters a week. It's how many podcasts, how many extra YouTube videos, you know, like what's the total volume you're outputting in the week?

I read a book every 18 months. Okay. I do seven podcasts a week. I put out a newsletter every week. Seven recordings a week. Cross different podcasts. I do two to three media hits, either radio or television a week. And I try not to work more than 30 or 40 hours. And storytelling is my core competence.

They think it's me. I think it's me and my kitchen with a camcorder and dueling on an Afghan. I have 28 people approaching media. I have some talent.

But the key between a practice and an enterprise that creates real money is to find outstanding people and get them to leverage your time in your talent.

“But are you sitting down and actually writing this these 1,000 or 2,000 words and then they're going to take you that and help you turn it into more stuff?”

And I have several writers. And we go through stories. So Epstein files. Biggest story I might. Do we have anything original to say here? What's the angle? No, we don't have an angle here. And I'm not interested in talking about it. Oh, let's write about the power of national economic strikes. Why it's so powerful and that the Trump administration only listens to markets doesn't lose to listen to protest, citizenry. That's an interesting angle. All right. You're writing the newsletter this week. You draft these paragraphs. I'll draft these three paragraphs. I'll edit it Thursday night. We need. Oh, we have Josh Shapiro coming on the podcast tomorrow. What are the questions? We just go through all the different stories and content.

And then we try and come up with original things. And then we start producing the content. And then when it's good, we have great editors. We snake it through our channels. It might be the newsletter. It might be our Instagram posts. It might be our LinkedIn. It might be. If I really like something, I'm like, OK, that's going to be chapter seven of a book called Project 2028, which is my next book, which is a response to Project 25, more of a progressive policy book. But we do an editorial meeting and people get to work. They pitch stories. They pitch me on all these stories. And I say, what's the angle here? What's the data or the insight we're bringing to the story? And if you can't answer that question, I'm like, well, let's see NBC or CNN cover it.

What about your solo creative time? So, you know, Disney would wake up and doodles or sign-filled wakes up goes to the kitchen table and writes jokes for two hours. It's, you know, the solitude part where you're going to have your original ideas outside of the team. Yeah. I generally go to sleep around 2 or 3am, and I sleep till about 10. And my creative time is usually my best hours between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. with the dogs. Everyone's asleep. I feel a peace. I know my boys are safe. I turn on my fireplace. Sometimes I have a drink. Sometimes I have an edible. And my dogs are with me. And I do some surfing online.

“I think about something inspired me and I'll leave the good downstairs and do a video in a fur coat or I'll start writing. And then the next morning, I look at it and go, this is shit or I go, oh, this is pretty good.”

And I start pinging around and I say, okay, add some data here, get all sent into our illustration people and say, start thinking about charts for this. We're going to put it out.

And newsletter forum or as a video, but I'm constantly thinking about producing data, but my flow state is really, really late at night. Are you doing any company running? Like any administrative or any managing? Less and less. I used to do that a lot. I, you know, like you. Sam, I've run and built companies. Now, I have the luxury of doing what I want to do and what I want to do is create content. And I have outstanding people, Catherine Dillon and a woman named Chloe DeJocas just who's been wearing her a long time.

Catherine's been my partner for 15 years. They run the business. Occasionally, they'll bring me into trying to close someone we're hiring.

“I get on the phone. I see the fanat. I love numbers. I see the financials almost every week. And I think I can spot weakness and strength from the analytics and the numbers.”

To the most part, I want out of the business. I love running business, except for the clients and the employees. I have other people managing everything almost in the really talented and I pay them really well. And I can focus on doing what I love, which is creating content and and saying provocative, interesting things and trying to have, you know, trying to matter if you will. But I'm out of the business of running businesses. I'm done. I am done. Were you good boss? I think I was just okay. I was good in the sense that I think I created economic security for a lot of people.

I was raised in a generation in San Francisco where Steve Jobs is our mentor. And there was this terrible, the stall, instead infected a bunch of young tech executives, including myself that if you were talented and nice, you were talented. If you were talented and an asshole, you were Steve Jobs and you were a genius.

And so I wasn't nearly as kind. I was never mean to people, but I wasn't nearly as kind as I should have been.

And what you happens when you get older is you realize you have this capital. Sometimes it's just financial capital. You can pay people well. But if you're a senior level exact and someone they respect, grabbing someone and sending them and playing them into a room or sending them an email sign. You were outstanding here. I'm so impressed with you.

And now I do it all the time. I'm trying to catch up.

But I also, on the negative side, occasionally say something stupid in a meeting, and rather than taking them aside and saying, that makes no sense. I would say in the meeting, that makes no f**k sense. And the person would be humiliated. That was not, I'm not proud of that. That was not a kind thing to do. But I thought that's leadership. I could have been so much kinder. So I am now, I try to be really thoughtful and proactive.

And I hear about someone getting divorced and I just call them and say, "I'm giving you money." I had a friend of mine who's fairly famous, get arrested a few days ago and f**k many apples. And I'm like, "Just send me your bank details. Everyone needs money when they get arrested." Like, don't talk about it. Don't, there's something I've learned. Don't ask people if they need help. Help them.

But don't ask. No one wants to say, "Yeah, I need help. You're more powerful than me."

And I f**k up. And you're on top. I need your help. Don't ask people if they need help. Help them.

“I think the fun part about talking with you is like, "This, okay. So this podcast, we start out as incredibly ambitious, like, get after it."”

Uh, type of, like, guys in San Francisco. Incredibly insecure guys who thought success would solve the problem. Yeah. But we, uh, it's really fun talking to you because I think that, like, you have to remind yourself on a consistent basis that the reason why this whole entrepreneurship thing is kind of cool is because you could help others, you could put your debt in there and all that stuff. But you could do it your way. You know, the best part about this podcast is we've done nearly 800 episodes. We've talked, we've talked to so many people and we could show you examples of someone who has broken every single rule or followed every single rule and they've still gotten to the end state, the end goal.

And the cool thing about business is there's just, you can, you can, you can do it anyway. And it's really cool to hear you explain the ways that you do things, which is very unconventional, it's super not common. And you are achieving the desired goal, which is to build a great company, to treat people well and to have a good life. When you go on your 50s, this weird thing happens. And it's really awful. Your friends start dying. There's these genetic time bombs that go off. And the last few years I've had a friend die from a nerve disorder, leukemia and pancreatic cancer, if we just should not have died.

There's a picture of eight of us from the fraternity UCLA, all, you know, closest, our posse, our closest friends. Three of us are dead. And if you had ranked all of us, including some of us who've become obese, some of us who were too stressed out, these would have been the guys who would be least likely to die.

“And so, all of a sudden, you just start thinking about, okay, what's important to me? And if you're blessed with economic security, you immediately move to like, all right, money is a means, but it's not the ends.”

And it is very hard to start behaving that way. I just put a f*ck Jackson Hole, because I got offered $200,000 to speak. And I said, yes, I can't help if someone offers me four times or five times my mother's annual salary when she was a secretary. I can't help it, I go. And it took me away from my boys for three days. By the way, it's not easy to get from London to Jackson Hole, just to you know. And for one hour speech to these masters of the universe, and I'm like, why am I, I got there and I'm like, why am I here?

I miss my kid had one line singing in his thing and I'm like, I should be at that. Are the f*ck am I not there? And so you realize, as you get older, like, if you're blessed with some level of economic security, do shit with your friends, do shit on your own. One of my role models is this kind of embarrassing Rosenstein famous hedge fund manager. And I asked, I can't for any, I was asking him about wealth. Like, once you get to a point of economic security, he said, the hard part is in the lesson here is the following.

“When you get to a economic security, there's three buckets in your life. There's things you have to do. You said, Scott, if my biggest investors in town, I have to have dinner with them.”

There's things you want to do. I want to go on college tour with my, my oldest. I want to do that. And then there's things you should do. The real power of economic security is like eliminate the should bucket. There's things you want to do. There's things you have to do. Get rid of the should. And when I realized it's like half the things I was doing in my life with a should bucket. Why have I been invited to Davos? Well, I absolutely should go. I'm a **** Davos. I'm like, why am I here? Why am I here?

Well, why'd you go? Why'd you go to Jackson? Why'd you go that way? Because I'm still insecure and think that if I get invited back to Davos, I will be enough.

That finally I will fill the hole that can't seem to be filled here. It's not like Gavin did fill the hole though.

Well, okay, it was fine, but I should. There's no reason for me to go to Davos. There's literally no reason. I mean, great, a fist bomb from Governor Newsom is fantastic, but I get invited to everything. That sounds obnoxious, but it's true.

Davos has the sex appeal of a Marriott lobby. It is the ages couldn't be anymore non-sexy. Anyways, it's liberating to go.

“Do I need to go to this seminar because there's going to be a lot of powerful people there? Do I need to accept a speaking gig because it's a lot of money?”

No, you don't need to. So you've talked about economic security, and you said that term a bunch of times. If somebody's listening to this and they'll go, what numbers does that take? And it's obviously somewhat different for everybody, but walk, walk the listener through, what is economic security? How should they think about that? Because I know guys have got a lot who still need more. I know people who don't have much. That should probably fight a little harder to get a little bit more because they'd have more free time.

Give me the milestones of the benchmarks and ideally with numbers that you can take care. The numbers are easy. Take your, take your burn, take what you think you need every year to be happy for some people that's 60,000 a year. My dad with Social Security needed like another 10 or 20 grand a year to live the way he wanted to live. Some people need a million bucks a year, and then times it by 25, assume a post tax return of 4%. And once you have 25 times the burn you think you'll need, you can start eliminating the shit bucket.

And does that change over time? Because you're a burn at the time when you probably first got secure was different than now if you're selling $3 billion a year.

“I've been very open about this. I think not talking about your money is an attempt to keep middle and lower income homes down.”

Rich people talk about money to each other all the time. I spent $3 to $400,000 a month. So if you take that at 5 million times 25, I need 125 million to be economically secure. And by the way, when I was younger, I thought if I ever have a million dollars I'm done. I used to think like in my 20s, if I could ever save a million dollars, I'm done. I'm going to start writing scripts for Tom Cruise films and just do whatever I want.

And then as you get older, you realize how expensive kids are, how expensive it is to live in New York, how expensive it is to take care of your parents,

and your taste and your Greek lands begin to grow. Right? You're like, I could never imagine owning multiple homes pretty soon you can.

I live in Manhattan and it's just crazy seeing how people live in. There's people, you could earn $3 million a year. This is going to be a clip that someone's going to mock me for, but let me just say you can make $2 to $3 million a year and seriously with a family and live paycheck to paycheck. It's crazy how much money people spend to live here. I know people who will spend $100,000 a month and they tell me they don't feel what rich. It's pretty wild. No, you're exactly right. No one feels sorry for you, but if you live in Manhattan and in 2010, I was just starting to get speaking gigs.

I was just starting to get sort of real money from being a professor. My partner was working at Goldman.

“I think we were making 7 or 800 grand a year. That felt like a lot of money to me. We couldn't afford to live in Manhattan.”

We just had two kids. Granted, we didn't need to center kids to private school, but we were going to. We were renting. Our rent was $14,000 a month. We needed a three bedroom because we had a living because she worked and so did I. We had no money. Yeah, it's not your birthright to live in Manhattan. So what we did was, and I think that sent us over the edge was my kid applied to seven schools at the age of four. I got rejected from all seven because he was speech delayed. By the way, historians, well, he just got into UVA early decision. So things worked out for him.

But when he couldn't speak at the age of four, all seven schools we applied do said no. So when schools that you're going to pay $58,000 to for the kid to play with blocks decide they don't want your son. I'm like, that's it, we're out of here. I moved to Florida back when it was inexpensive in 2010 and I'm not exaggerating.

I said, I cut my burn by probably 50 percent. I rented a place on the intercostal for $5,000 a month instead of paying 14. The school was 14,000 instead of 58.

And we were very disciplined. We took all of our savings, including the 13 percent of top line in tax savings and we invested in the market and kind of the rest is history. It's fine to be ambitious. I find young people don't want an honest conversation around what's required to live the lifestyle they want to live where they want to live it. And people are really, there's a lot of really happy people living in a suburb of St. Louis who join a country club coach little league and make 100 grand a year.

There are husband and nurse, maybe they work part-time, he works part-time at an on-profit. There's a lot of different ways to be happy, but be clear. If you want to live a Manhattan or LA or San Francisco or even now Miami and have a fabulous lifestyle, you're going to have to make a shit ton of money, which means you're going to have to work all the f*** time unless you're smart enough to have rich parents. And what I find with young people is they don't want to have an honest conversation around their burn and the sacrifice required to get there.

I was using a traditional bank and you know the type it's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours. And I hit send and a froze, they flagged the transaction, they lock my account, they put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me, I got to visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new bank solution. After asking if you founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury.

“And so now my payroll is two clicks, I can wire money, I can pay invoices, I can reimburse the team, all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies.”

And so do 200,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to murky.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company not a bank, bank the surface is provided through choice financial group, call them in and evolve bank address members FDIC. Okay, we can finish with this. So you've you've got sons and so I almost want to think about like what you would tell your sons. So I want to know what advice you believe to be true. But a part of you hesitates to say it publicly because it might sound harsh or unfair and people won't like it.

I don't have a lot of those. You kind of made your profession off this, but I think for for most of you it was a pretty tough question. Drink more. Go out. Drink more. Make a series about decisions on my pay off.

When you're in the company of women, you pay for everything always. No woman is ever going to kiss you if who splits the check with you.

All mammals have a mating process. The downside of sex is much greater for a woman, her fertility window is much shorter. Men benefit more from relationships. The asymmetry and advantage of going on day with a woman one way you restore that asymmetry and demonstrate valor is to pay with absolutely no expectation. It's just it's just a given and my kids are like, dad, you're so boomer and like just be clear. No one's ever going to kiss you who you don't pay for. Is that what you said to the woman on your first date when she's like, oh no, let's split it. You're like listen.

“I think that is something that TikTokers talk about. I've never seen a woman grab for a check and I know that sounds sexist.”

I've just I've never I've never in my life had a woman pay for everything anything and I know that. I like to pay before I get there. So it's not awkward with like nine pages and I can't read that's a tip. This is baller move. Just we're done. There's no expectation. I'm not a John. You're not a prostitute, but I appreciate your time. I'm hoping some at some point to have sex with you. So I want to demonstrate strength and that I can take care of your kids versus the guy wearing a Cassio watch who talks about sending you a memo request. I don't care what anyone says.

One way you demonstrate valor and masculinity. If you can't pay, I hate it when men split checks. Dude, man, the f*** up. You get this one. I get the next one. You don't split checks. You're going to make some way to go back and figure out how to split the check and who's going to give them 14 or 17%. I've done this from a young age. I did not have money until I was in my 40s. If I couldn't afford to pay, I didn't go. I didn't go. Anyways, drink more. I've gotten real push back on that.

And men should always pay. Always. So those are two things.

So, Dar Mesh. Do you know Dar Mesh Scott? Yeah. He's the founder of Hubsby. I assume he's a billionaire.

“I think he is a billionaire. And he went to Mount One out to dinner with him and I brought a friend of mine.”

And we ate a lot. It was a really fancy restaurant. And he ran to the bathroom. And I wanted to be cool and I paid the bill. And he came back and he was, hey, let's pay. And I was like, no, it's taken care of already. And he was like, what? What? And he ran to the kitchen. He made him refund the check to me and he paid. And I was like, Dar Mesh, what are you doing, man? Like, let me, let me, let me be cool here. And he was like, listen.

Years ago, when I was like 22 or 24, I came to America and I started a business. And I wanted to get customers. And everyone told me you had to play golf. And I didn't know how to play golf. And I feel awkward playing golf. But then another person told me, well, just take a message dinner and just pay for the bill. And that's a really good way for you to like treat people nicely and particularly customers.

And he goes from that day forward. And I think he was 25. I vowed to pay for dinner 100% of the time that I went out. And no one would ever pay for my dinner. And so if you go and pay for this dinner, you will be ruining 25 years of me paying for everyone's dinner. And it was hilarious to hear him just like go through this spill. And so he has paid for everyone's dinner that he's ever been not to eat with for 25 years now.

There's some nuance here. And my partner reminded me of this. I always pay for every dinner and she's like, you realize,

this is an ego thing and it's about control. And she goes, I get where you're coming from. But people who are your friends and also have their own economic security don't want you constantly asserting your ego and your power over them by paying for everything all the time. That this is about your insecurity. It's no longer about your generosity. It's about your insecurity and trying to express some sort of weird f*** of dominance. And I got so angry when she said this because I think some of it is true.

And the reality is that's not a friendship.

Yeah, that's sort of a noxious. That's like, yeah, big that's like, I'm on top.

“Yeah, occasionally you need to call your friends and say, I'm struggling with my marriage. I just got diagnosed with high blood pressure.”

I'm really upset about it. Your friends want to comfort you. Your friends don't want to be just your, you know, beneficiary. They want, they want occasionally to say, no, I'm doing well. I can pay for dinner. I get that. I think that if you're not letting occasionally asking your friends for help and being vulnerable and exposing your insecurities and your weaknesses and your anxiety, then you don't have a friendship. And what I realized was a lot of it was ego with me trying to, you know, thumb up my chest.

I don't need anyone's help. I just help everybody else. Then you don't have friendships. You have a series of transactions. But I go back to what I'm saying, anyone with ovaries you pay for everything. No, no answer that one.

What I like is that you have a code. I think that I'm always interested at attracted to people who have their own code that they've established a way of living.

And I tend to disagree with a lot of their code, but more than anything I agree with the fact that they have a code and I respect that. I think most people lack a code to live by. I think they lack an operating philosophy. I think maybe religion used to give it to them. I think they reject the one that their parents or society want, you know, there's a natural desire to reject what your parents or society pushes on you. But it's not replaced or substituted with a valuable operating philosophy. And I think that's probably one of the things that people lack the most.

“I hope that if even if you disagree with half of the shit that Scott said, I think the more important thing is to ask, do you have a code?”

And do you have a code that you live by and that you've established on your own terms from your own lived experiences and in values? I 100% agree. Some people get their, everybody needs a code. Too many decisions coming out. You without a code. Some people get it from religion, the military, their parents. I didn't have a code when I was younger. I was trying to handle everything, temporarily, and it was hard. So, yeah, an imperfect code is better than no code at all. Otherwise, it's so hard to just know how to handle all these situations.

And I very much agree, you guys never brought up my side or my movement, resist and unsubscribe.

Well, I really don't, I don't even know what this all about. Tell me what to tell me. Like, summer from the beginning, I genuinely don't even know what you're talking about. I am horrified by what's going on in Minneapolis and across our nation.

“I think there's a difference between writing and being effective. I want to move to being effective.”

What I've noticed is the Trump administration only walks back things when the markets move. And the fastest way to make the markets move right now is to go after the companies that are 40% of the S&P by unsubscribing from Amazon, from Apple, from Microsoft platforms, from, I have a whole list of what I call ground zero. And then going after and holding the power of the purse from companies providing infrastructure with their TNT or Hilton. But I have a side called Resistance Unsubscribed. And I'm trying to convince people that the weapon hiding in plain sight is their spending.

70% of our economy is consumer spending. And if you just in 2020, the greatest political action in history was the first quarter of 2020. And it wasn't because hundreds of thousands of people were dying was because the GDP crashed 31%. If we can put a dent in the Magnificent TNT's economic power, the president will hear about that and he will respond. And the fast way to do that, if you unsubscribed from chat, GPT, they're trading at 40 times revenues, $240. That's $10,000 in market cap. You take away from open AI. If you tried to do that with crowbars, you would need five families to stop buying all groceries for a year.

So, go after the soft tissue and that is tech companies subscription. And you're going to find, as I did, you have three subscriptions to anthropic. You don't need three. I have seven streaming media platforms. I don't need seven. I was on Amazon one, the health care company paying $199. I don't need that. This is unsubscribed February. It's a great time to take stock of all the money you're spending at the hands of millions of people and billions of capital. They convince you to spend more money than you need. And it sends a message to the markets and the administration.

Resist and unsubscribed. And these companies, they are specifically contributing to the problem. Are you just saying, the whole market has to shake for the administration to move. It's not that these individual companies did anything wrong. Is that what you're saying? Oh, no. They're enabling this bullshit. When Tim Cook shows up with inscribed hard drives and goes to the Malania premiere, when Jeff Bezos pays $45 million for a documentary.

It's a documentary that brightens up the room by leaving it. You're picking companies that have kissed the ring, is what you're talking about. These are the enablers. These are the people who've said, OK, kisses ass. I mean, there's some historical precedence here. In the early 30s, Germany, the captains of the manufacturing industry,

I will crush the trade unions and you'll make a shit ton of money. There's an apt analogy here. And that is, I get text messages from these guys saying, I hate myself. I don't want to go to the White House. I'm like, well, I hate you too, because you're not willing to speak up. And the very values and principles rule of law, capitalism, competition, free markets.

The built these amazing companies and made these guys billionaires is under attack right now.

And they don't want to speak up because they think they're going to make money. We'll be careful what you ask for. But these are the enablers in your free gift with purchase. Spend less money, send a message to the people who tell them to put away the knee pads and speak your mind. They probably have to do it collectively because he goes after people who go first. But this is a great way to send a message to the president, to the markets and to these individuals,

that this, what is happening here is un-American. And you are desecrating the values that made you so goddamn rich. And earlier you had said you have researchers in your tell my editorial process. And the example you used was like the power of a boycott. When I hear you talk about this, I think my $10 YouTube subscription doesn't move to needle. But it sounds like you have some data that shows otherwise.

If Microsoft misses its expectations by one percentage point, it loses 10% of its value. Other companies go down in sympathy. The NASDAQ 100 lost one and a half percent of one day. The only time the president is walked back, the annexation of Greenland or tariffs is when the markets have moved.

“How many people do you need to participate for this to matter?”

The reality is, okay, so these are my objectives. My objectives is to send a signal to the markets and consumers that they have power with their purchases.

And that they should be thoughtful about where they spend money and where they decide not to spend money. I'm trying to assemble infrastructure, part of my infrastructure is a website that makes it easy for people to unsubscribe from big tech platforms. I would love it if enough people collectively canceled such that all of a sudden amongst a variety of reasons. The CEOs of these companies say maybe we should be a little less sick of fantic. Maybe we should push back. Is that happening right now? Probably not.

I'm getting 100,000 unique today to my site. I'm getting thousands of screenshots. But is open AI changing its plans because of what I'm doing. Probably not. But here's the thing is you get older. I'm sick of heckling from the sheep seats. I want to be on the field. I want to be doing something. When I was a younger man, I used to take public risk. And now I just get angry at everybody else. So I wanted to do something. But it all be honest. It's going to take a lot. But it would take less unsubscribe from big tech to have an impact than anything else.

And one day protests are powerful, but there's more symbolic, the more cinematic than powerful.

“I think if a single digit millions of people unsubscribe from tech platforms, one they'd find out that they're saving a lot of money and spending money where they didn't think to.”

And I think these guys would notice. So yeah, you know, I'm one hair on the horses tail, but I'm kind of sick of talking about it, not doing anything. It must be kind of fun though a little bit too. Like you said, like, I like to give money because it makes me feel good. This kind of, I think that it feels nice to have an enemy and to get behind a movement. And you're worried you're throwing a party into what's going to show up, right? So there's some public failure risk here, but it feels good to do things with other people. And also, I just I just canceled my Uber account.

And when you cancel it, it gives you a graphic. It shows you how many times you've ordered for mover eats. I've ordered 34 times mover eats. And then it shows you how many Uber rides you've taken. In the last 10 years, I've taken 3747 Uber rides. So I take 350 rides a year. I do Uber locks. I don't want to car. And as big tech platforms do, they used to price it very aggressively. They consolidate the market. And then Uber has raised the prices on Uber acts. I'm sorry, Uber locks 7 to 10% of your way by ventilation.

So the average price of Uber locks when I was first taking it was 40 to 60 bucks. Now it's 80 to 120. So, and again, story of privilege, I'm spending $35,000 a year on Uber. So I've started taking the tube here in London. I've started taking the subway in New York, which is awesome. And I've started taking Uber acts. And I figured with the money I'm saving. I could lease an I7 a Range Rover or a GWag and including insurance and parking. And this is a story of privilege. I realize most people can't spend that kind of money on Uber.

But what I'm telling you is if you really look at recurring revenue subscription payments to Big Tech, you're going to find out you can save a lot of money without a great deal of effort. And so I'm excited about this. This is the soft tissue. This is the testicles of the economy. These companies are out way over their skis.

“Their valuations are inflated. If you want to send a message to the president, don't like and subscribe this video.”

Resist and unsubscribed.

We are not part of the testicles of this country.

That's right.

“Resist and unsubscribed.com. That's where they do it.”

All right. That's it. Amazing. As always, thanks for coming on, man. I hope you had fun.

I really enjoy this. Thanks, guys. I appreciate the thoughtful questions.

“Cool. All right. Thank you, man. That's it. That's the pod we appreciate you.”

Take care.

All right, my friends. I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit.

“And it's hosted by Luis and Fanzi Camillo.”

After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fanzi are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators. And you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcasts.