Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned In Brief. At his current pace, President Trump is on track to upend Social Security, the Department of Education, our alliances with the European Union and everything else in between by summer. Joining me to break down some of the critical issues facing our nation and how to fix them is Scott Galloway. Scott is an entrepreneur, author, professor of marketing at NYU and host of the Vox Media podcasts, “The Prof G Pod” and “Pivot” with Kara Swisher. Scott, my friend, welcome back to the show.

Scott Galloway:

Preet, it’s always good to see you.

Preet Bharara:

So we’re going to talk about Social Security. I want to talk about that, income inequality. But before we do any of that, just because it’s the 4th day running that it’s been in the news and we are recording this on Thursday, March 27th, Signalgate, do you have any view of that? Do you think it’s being taken seriously enough? Too seriously? Does it have legs? All those normal questions, what do you think of that?

Scott Galloway:

Well, if you just go back and look at the statements of Hegseth’s saying that if anyone else did this, they would be fired, or that these acts are treasonous and this is a violation of criminal activity. They’re talking about an offense, which by any standard, was a much lesser offense of Hillary Clinton’s emails. So I would defer to what they said a few years ago when someone else had what feels like a parking ticket compared to the double murder violation of national security.

Look, I think on the left we sometimes take for granted the prosperity and rights and advantage we hold globally based on our ability to deliver an unprecedented, almost monopoly-like capability to deliver violence around the world. When the attacks of October 7th happen, President Biden can deploy 2 carrier airstrike forces that has 6,000 sailors each, support ships, massive intelligence, unbelievable technical capabilities that basically sit off the coast of the Mediterranean and tell Iran and other proxies of Iran to sit down. And that a war, a nation that’s nuclear power doesn’t get backed into a corner because Hamas is unable to inspire a five-front war, which they were hoping to do because of our ability to deliver such lethal power around the world.

I think the left gets that wrong and they make the mistake of recognizing and appreciating that the most impressive organization in history is the U.S. government. There’s no entity that’s offered more rights, more prosperity for a lower cost, lower taxes than the U.S. government. And within that government, the SEAL Team Six, the all-star team is the U.S. military, which is arguably the most impressive organization in the world. And the people on the ground or the people flying, the guy or gal flying that F-15 trusts that that individual from Kansas or Nebraska is up all night worried about making sure that every part on that plane is working effectively, that the agents on the ground are giving them good intel, that the people back at home are not reckless or careless with their safety.

And my question is, are we going to still be able to deliver that lethal monopoly-like violence in the future when allies are less likely to share information with us, when our troops on the ground are being recruited are not confident that the senior-most people in those organizations are really concerned or have any fidelity towards my safety? So I think unfortunately, this is the damage, real damage here is over the medium and the long term. And if you get a DUI, on average, it means you have driven drunk 80 times before getting that DUI.

So the real damage here isn’t a journalist who, by the way understands more about defense protocols and security protocols than our Secretary of Defense, that did not release the data until after the attacks. That immediately, once he recognized he was privy to data, errantly exited the chat, resisted the temptation to get no number of Pulitzers by staying and finding out what else they were talking about. What you have here is the real serious question is how many times has this happened across our defense infrastructure or apparatus that bad actors didn’t do the right thing and log off and then write about it? So when you put a bunch of pee-wee little league players in the MLB, in the major leagues to believe that there’s not going to be unforced errors everywhere is obvious. What’s more dangerous here is the errors that have likely taken place are not in plain view.

Preet Bharara:

And the one guy was in Moscow.

Scott Galloway:

I mean, the problem here is-

Preet Bharara:

It keeps getting worse and worse and worse. So who should resign? The whole lot?

Scott Galloway:

Oh gosh, I don’t know. I think there’s going to be … I want to get to your view. I think there needs to be a blood offering.

Preet Bharara:

I think Trump is starting to get upset because day four … Their shock and awe strategy of executive orders and memoranda and crazy statements and shows of force and renaming gulfs like the one that used to be the Gulf of Mexico. And depending on whether you’re the AP or not the AP is still the Gulf of Mexico. And when you do all that and you have one story that has broken through for four … I don’t know that there’s another story that is adverse to the Trump administration that has gone all day every day for four days and running. And by the time people listen to this on Monday, maybe it’ll be seven days. Now that’s not the most important marker of what is important, because once upon a time, CNN covered one airliner missing for I think 5,000 days. Not to minimize that. Why this thing more than the other things? Is it because it has a sort of natural nonpartisan flavor to it?

Scott Galloway:

This just seems incompetent even for this level of … This is especially stupid even for this group. And also I think when you’re talking about national security, it does become a bipartisan issue. So it feels, you’re allowed to insult and shitpost anyone in government unless they’re carrying a gun or an ax. Cops, firemen and the military are generally considered competent people. And so when you reflect incompetence, that puts those people in danger. You can fire a bunch of people in the National Forestry Service, you can cut off payments for USAID. But when you start reducing our kind of … There’s a certain macho feel to the military that Americans take very seriously. And just the irony here, the hypocrisy, the incompetence.

I mean, they’re not even … We’re arguing over apps and phones. They’re not even supposed to be using apps and phones. They have SCIFs. It reflects a certain lack of any recognition of protocols or expertise that the nation has developed to this point to ensure that our allies and our soldiers are not errantly shot out of the air for dumb reckless reasons.

The Trump administration has been brilliant at what I would call deploying weapons of mass distraction. So for example, just in this case, I think Trump said, “How do we turn lemons into lemonade? Everyone’s focused on this. I know. I’ll launch or I’ll announce the Stablecoin from a company that’s backed or owned by my kids.” If Sasha, Malia Obama and Chelsea Clinton launched a stablecoin while Clinton or Obama was president, there’d be calls to impeach them. And I think some Democrats would probably move to impeach them. The level of grift here, there’s so many things. Okay, let’s argue over whether a helicopter crash was because of DEI. Let’s argue over the naming of a gulf such that we can distract from the fact that we’re surrendering to Putin and we’re about to massively increase deficits, which is nothing but a tax on young people, so we can cut taxes for the rich. And it goes to how we respond.

I think we need to be focused on a small number of issues, not go after everything, not realize we have to respond to everything and be calm and bring facts. But this issue does seem to have coalesced moderates and even some Republicans and all Democrats around competence matters. We kind of knew that, but we didn’t want to believe it. Competence really matters, and I do think you’re going to see a blood offering here, not because the President cares about national … The safety of our men and women in uniform, but because quite frankly, this is embarrassing him.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve said this before and maybe you said a similar thing. Joe Biden’s numbers began to plunge and never fully recovered after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was not an issue of ideology. It was an issue of competence in the minds of many people, it involved our soldiers.

Scott Galloway:

Yeah. That’s interesting.

Preet Bharara:

So combining incompetence with harm and danger and risk to our soldiers is a fairly unforgivable thing in the United States. You were talking about how the military is a special thing and not everyone appreciates it every day. The sort of most palpable expression of admiration for and gratitude I’ve ever had towards our United States military was a moment on September 11th where I was in Downtown Manhattan and watched the buildings go down.

And at some point that day I saw a fighter jet over Manhattan, and I don’t know. Something about the sight of an American fighter jet over the island of Manhattan, which in normal times would be like, “What’s that about?” Or “Is there a ball game nearby?” In this instance, I was very happy that we’re a powerful country even though we were brought to our knees on that day. Do you think that Trump, just to segue to the way Trump seems to be treating veterans in this country, my question is not an articulate one. What the hell is he thinking? Even if he’s not directing it, allowing the narrative to get written that the DOGE is willy-nilly dumping veterans out of their jobs. Is that because Trump, as people have told us over the years, actually thinks that veterans are suckers or is it something else?

Scott Galloway:

To a certain extent, I think DOGE is kind of a bit of a misdirect again from some of the bigger issues I think we should be focusing on. And that is supposedly so far they’ve, according to the Wall Street Journal, they’ve saved 2.6 billion in terms of cost-cutting. And if this has been sort of a, call it a full body physical cavity search of the corpus and the health of the U.S. government around fraud and waste, it’s striking what a clean bill of health the federal government is getting. They’re having trouble finding waste. If you look at their wall of receipts, the first one they said was 8 billion. It ended up being 8 million that had already been spent. And then items two, three, and four on the wall of receipts were just not true. They’re having trouble. To me, this almost is like a clean audit. You get audited and the auditor comes back and says, “Wow, this is pretty good.”

Preet Bharara:

Well, audits usually last more than nine weeks.

Scott Galloway:

There you go. This represents so many weird things. I do think it’s a bit of a distraction, 2.6 billion. They could 6X the savings of DOGE by cutting off all subsidies to Tesla, which would’ve been 15 to 50 billion. So I think that is also a bit of a misdirect. I think the Democrats believing there’s going to be outrage, and I think you’ve seen it in some of these town halls, especially around veterans and people getting their Medicaid or fears around Medicaid. I think that stuff really hits home. And you see that in the town halls.

But I think some of the Democrats clutching their pearls, if you will, over the injustice of being fired by email. I think a lot of Americans sort of say, “Welcome to the workweek.” That’s happened to me before. I’ve had injustice all over the place in the private sector. And I do think some people like the idea of the government facing some of the same pressures as the private sector.

Now, I’ve run companies my whole life. The idea of firing the entire tech team and then realize I needed them back, similar to what they did with the people overseeing our nuclear stockpile and then saying, “Oh, we screwed up. We need those people back.” You’re not going to get all of them back. Who you’re going to get back are the people who don’t have the same opportunities. The people with the most opportunities will not come back. They will take that call from Google or from Constellation Energy and they’ll leave.

Preet Bharara:

And the people who do come back are going to be constantly on the lookout for some other more secure job, are they not?

Scott Galloway:

The NSA, the military recruit out of my class at Stern. I think you’re going to see a noticeable dip in the quality and number of people who want to go to work for the government because the government has always been seen as a place to make a decent living. You don’t go there for the money, but you’re doing something in the agency of something bigger than yourself. And there’s some job security. Let’s be honest. It’s not, “Oh, we had a bad quarter. Let’s lay off 20% of the staff.”

And so they’re able, and again, there’s a myth that government workers are bureaucratic and incompetent. On the whole relative to what we pay them, the U.S. government has exceptionally skilled people who go to work at all levels. So the damage here that’ll be lasting is that in 2028, God willing, if Democrats retake the White House, they’re going have no trouble finding really talented people to fill the most senior roles, including people like yourself. What is going to be much harder is the millions of people in the engine room who you’re just going to see a permanent degradation because of the issues you’re talking about. A lack of consistency, a lack of pride, feeling that they’re not taken seriously, feeling as if they’re treated with a lack of respect. That’s just not the place where our best and brightest at every entry, mid-level are going to go. That’s the real damage that’s been done here.

Preet Bharara:

So Mr. Business Professor, tariffs and recession. Discuss.

Scott Galloway:

Well, I’ll go in reverse order. Guys like me have predicted nine of the last three recessions. So it’s dangerous to predict a recession.

Preet Bharara:

Did you predict the one in 2022 that didn’t happen?

Scott Galloway:

I didn’t. Keep in mind in 2021 for the first time ever, the Bloomberg panel of 100 economists all guessed we were going into recession. All 100. And of course we didn’t.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Scott Galloway:

The economy, I think we tend to over and underestimate how much impact on the economy the President, the executive branch has because the U.S. economy is this miracle of innovation, risk-taking, capital, greed that keeps on churning during wartime and even during periods like this. Now having said that, if you said, “I want to find the most elegant way to increase our prices and reduce the competitiveness of our products overseas, such that we elegantly and crisply reduce our prosperity in the United States,” it would be difficult to think of a more elegant way than tariffs. I was a graduate student instructor in business school for macro and microeconomics and we used to refer to tariffs, we did an entire class on tariffs the same way I imagine they talk about leeches in medical school. And the general view was can you believe they were stupid enough to do this? Now-

Preet Bharara:

But some tariffs okay?

Scott Galloway:

To restore asymmetric trade. 100% tariffs on our cars, theirs are coming in for zero. Now we’re going to levy similar tariffs with the goal of doing away with all tariffs. You probably need some level of domestic steel production in case we have to make tanks overnight. So it probably makes sense to protect some of those industries. Chips, it might make sense to have tariffs. Strategic tactical use of tariffs makes sense. Blanket tariffs against our allies that they don’t even know what they did to deserve this. Canada. Canada, we’re going to hurt their economy more than ours. It’s impossible to understand. They used to be this amazing ally. They still are an amazing ally.

I always say that I love that test that Warren Buffett’s friend who was a Holocaust survivor said, “How do I know if someone’s a friend? I ask myself, would they hide me?” That is such a puncturing question that brings so much perspective. And you know what? Canada in 1979, in the Iran hostage crisis, they hid us. They hid six Americans at incredible danger to their own personal wellbeing because they saw us as real friends. It’s the largest undefended border in the world. We have NBA and Major League Baseball and basketball teams there. They love us. We love them. They’re our largest trading partner. And we’re claiming it’s because of the unfettered flow of fentanyl coming across the border, which by the way, could fit into a backpack. It’s less than 1%.

Preet Bharara:

Don’t we send more fentanyl to Canada than Canada sends to us?

Scott Galloway:

Well, 80% of arrests around fentanyl drug trafficking are Americans, despite the fact our desire to demonize everyone else, you could make the argument that China and Mexico have been lax around the flow of fentanyl. I am willing to listen to that argument. But Canada? So we are essentially tearing up these unbelievably prosperous 80 year long alliances and relationships that someone else will fill the void. By the way, you know who’s crawling … I live in Europe. You know who’s crawling all over European companies and governments right now? China. And they’re basically saying the following, “You may not like us, but you can trust us. We do what we’re going to say. Have you thought about buying steel and cars from us? Have you thought about lowering the tariffs on our cars? Because we’re here, we’re good business partners.”

And China’s also showing up at hospitals in Cambodia and saying, “That infrastructure around that hospital that takes care of people with rare diseases, we heard it got cut off. It’s an infrastructure where good people have built an amazing hospital, we’re here, we’ll pay for it.” So you have this void, this vacuum that I don’t think most Americans appreciate how much work has gone into establishing these unbelievable relationships that we benefit from there. 88% of our toys come from China. The majority, a lot of our lumber, our electricity comes from Canada. A car, parts of a car will sometimes go across and back from Mexican and Canadian borders a half a dozen or a dozen times.

See, these tariffs might raise the prices of cars by $12,000 domestically and kind of overnight with the reciprocal tariffs that we will register will make our cars much less competitive overseas. So if you want to raise prices, you want to decrease our quality of life? Tariffs. Predicting a recession is a dangerous business. But Goldman Sachs has taken GDP growth down from 2.4 to 1.7, and the Atlanta Fed GDP estimator went from 4% thinking this year was going to be a banner year down to -17. Now that’s an analytical response with no human oversight, that might be a little bit volatile, but it’s hard to imagine an easier way to reduce our prosperity.

Preet Bharara:

Can we sink for a moment to the level of armchair psychology? This issue of Trump and not caring about our allies, one could suggest, I’m not suggesting it, but it just occurred to me as you were talking, that that’s a man who doesn’t have close friends, has never been known to have a close buddy, like people have, male or female. He’s a pretty detached and aloof guy, although he’s turned out to be a very good retail politician. Is it silly to think that has something to do with the lack of value he places on alliances and friendships between countries?

Scott Galloway:

Well, the basis of the unlock of capitalism is that people recognizing that the butcher and the baker don’t trade for humanity. They do it because if they both focus on what they’re good at, they can each get the other’s products more inexpensively and raise their quality of life. And that capitalism recognizing it doesn’t have to be win-lose, it can be win-win, lifts all boats. And we’ve decided as a nation that helping other nations be more prosperous, makes a more peaceful nation. That if we make this extraordinary, generous investment in former enemies in the form of the Marshall Act and they build unbelievable economies that we wake up with the second or the third and the fourth-largest economies in the world, Germany and Japan, and they’re our allies.

Preet Bharara:

Trump would never have gone with the Marshall Plan. I’ve asked this question-

Scott Galloway:

No way. No way.

Preet Bharara:

And it would’ve been really too bad.

Scott Galloway:

Now moving to armchair psychology, I think I suffered a little bit from this, and that is, I think before the age of 40, I thought of relationships as transactional. And that is if an employee got off the elevator in one of my companies, there were two bubbles above his or her head. One was how much value they were adding and how much I was paying them. And if the right bubble ever got bigger than the left bubble, I would warn them and then I would fire them. If I wasn’t getting as much out of a friendship or a romantic relationship in the short or the medium term, I put that relationship on probation. And then as you get older, I think part of what it means to be a man is you pursue surplus value.

I’m now trying to pay above market and I’m doing a lot of virtue signaling right now. But anyways, I am. My goal, my goal is to pay my employees 30 to 60% above market. My goal is if I die thinking I’ve given my kids more love than they’ve given me, I’ve paid more tax revenue than government services I’ve absorbed then I win. And I didn’t recognize that. That’s been an enormous unlock in my life. It’s created a lot of happiness in my life that I realize I’m here to add surplus value. I’m meant to be on the debt side of the ledger. That doesn’t mean I’m ever abused, but occasionally it’s okay to leave a little bit of money on the table in a business transaction, it’s okay to pay people if you can a little bit more maybe than they would get in the free market, it’s okay to witness someone’s life in your life and notice them and absorb their upset and complaints and sometimes irrational behavior sometimes.

I think that’s what it means to be a man and a good person. And I don’t think that President Trump has ever really registered that unlock. I think he sees everything as win-lose.

Preet Bharara:

Is he neither a man nor a good person?

Scott Galloway:

I am writing a book on masculinity, and I would describe that sort of the pillars of masculinity are to be a provider, a protector, and a procreator. Now, in terms of a provider, I think you’d have to acknowledge that he’s provided for his children. I don’t know how well he pays his employees or he doesn’t.

In terms of a protector, I think he fails on every level. I think he makes more people feel bad about themselves. I think he’s conflated masculinity with coarseness and cruelty. On the right, they conflate masculinity with being kind of cruel. And on the far left, we’ve decided that masculinity is to act more like a woman. And I think there’s a void of an aspirational vision of masculinity. I don’t think you would make people feel this bad about themselves or be this insulting or cut off benefits or be this unethical. Quite frankly, I think the worst role model in the world right now for young men is Elon Musk. And that is, here’s a guy who is addicted to drugs, who has two women suing him concurrently for sole custody of their child because he doesn’t see them and is recklessly cutting off payments to children and veterans despite having a net worth of over $400 billion. I mean, that’s just not what a man does. That is not being a protector.

And I believe that if you really want to talk about the most masculine images of a person, it’s firemen or fire people, it’s cops, it’s our military. And what they do is the following. Their operating system is they default to protection. They’re here to protect you. I remember I had a fire alarm go off at a hotel in Seattle. The fire … Seven guys and a woman. And by the way, I think a lot of women demonstrate wonderful masculine qualities. And a lot of men demonstrate wonderful feminine qualities. These attributes aren’t sequestered to people born as one gender or the other, but they hear there’s a fire on the seventh floor. They don’t look at the cameras to see if there’s a raging fire to see if they’re putting themselves in harm’s way. They bomb to the seventh floor. And that kind of putting yourself in harm’s way in the service of other people and protecting them, I think that’s wonderful masculinity and demonstration of what it means to be a man.

And I think of Elon Musk as someone, and most recently, I just find this abhorrent, and I don’t like to talk about people’s kids, but when he makes it a public spectacle, he is saying that his daughter, because of a decision she made that he disagrees with, he has said publicly, she is dead to him. That is exactly what it means to not be a man. You may not agree with your kids’ decisions, but your default mechanism as a dad is protection. You default to protection. I can’t imagine any man I know or that I would ever be friends with publicly shaming his child.

And this is a guy that young men look up to because of some of his remarkable accomplishments in other fields of his life. And I worry that young men are thinking, “This is what it means to be a man.” And I do believe that it’s okay to say there are masculine attributes. Toxic masculinity is a terrible term. The two are oxymorons. The people who break up fights at bars are big, strong men. The people who defend our country oftentimes demonstrate wonderful masculine qualities. And I just don’t think we’re defining what it really means to be a man. And even when you say that, it triggers people because they immediately go, “Well, does that mean a woman can’t lead our country?” I’m not saying that at all.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to get to mail from your comments, Scott. I’ll forward them on to you.

Scott Galloway:

If we don’t get pushback Preet, it means we’re not saying anything.

Preet Bharara:

It’s like what we say in prosecutors, “If you have 100% conviction rate, you’re doing something wrong.”

Scott Galloway:

You’re not convicting enough people. You’re not going after enough people.

Preet Bharara:

Well, you’re not trying hard enough. You’re not doing anything that’s a little bit difficult.

Scott Galloway:

That’s right. Well, if you always get it right, I get it wrong a lot. If you always get it right, it means you’re stating the obvious.

Preet Bharara:

No, exactly correct. At least from my former field of work. Final question. We had a, what people call a rising star? Mallory McMorrow, who’s very likely to run for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. She’s a state senator now who has a really good message about the American Dream and the new American Dream and how Democrats can win again. What is Scott Galloway’s prescription for how Democrats can win again?

Scott Galloway:

We need to shift from being the Party of Indignance, just being outraged and emotional about everything to the Party of Ideas. And in my view, you need a unifying theory of everything that you reverse engineer every idea to. And my unifying theory of everything is the following. I think the group that has fallen furthest fastest in our nation is people under the age of 40 and specifically young men. And anyone under the age of 40 now is 24% less wealthy on average than they were 40 years ago. People over the age of 70 are 72% wealthier. Almost every tax policy, whether it’s mortgage interest rate tax deduction, capital gains tax deduction, the annual transfer of $1.2 trillion to Social Security, that’s a transfer of wealth from young to old, the massive overdone stimulus that took stocks and housing from 290 to 410 was nothing but bailing out people our age at the cost of entrants who want disruption. Where do they get a chance to buy Apple for 10? Netflix, 10 and $12 a share, which I got in 2008 because we let the markets fail?

So everything I think we do is a transfer of wealth from the young to the old. I think the unifying theory of everything is the following. That every person under the age of 40 should have the venues and the opportunities to find someone and fall in love and should they decide to have kids, have kids, and should they decide to have kids have housing, health care and a reasonable standard of living. And the incumbents will complain or plead complexity that that is impossible. That is bullshit. We have one company that creates $400 billion in value in 15 minutes post their earnings call. We have created more wealth in a 7 mile radius of SFO International Airport in the last 10 years than Europe’s created since World War II. Corporations are paying their lowest tax rate since 1939. The 25 wealthiest Americans pay an average tax rate of 6%. Universal childcare. Where do we meet? More freshmen classes, more vocational programming, more bars. I believe young people need to drink more. I think the non-alcohol movement is the worst thing to happen to young kids since-

Preet Bharara:

Wow, I didn’t see that coming.

Scott Galloway:

Well, there you go. So let’s talk about non-traditional ideas. The risks to a 25-year-old liver are dwarfed by the risks of social isolation. I’ll ask you a straight-up question Preet. What percentage do you think of your romantic relationships and your friends, the most important thing in your life at some point involved alcohol?

Preet Bharara:

before the age of 30? Very high percentage.

Scott Galloway:

Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman, I love them. But what these anti-alcohol movement people see is they see drunkenness. I see togetherness. I’m not suggesting you abuse alcohol. We need more third places, we need more parks, we need more non-profits, religious institutions. We need more opportunities for young people, specifically young men, to demonstrate excellence to a partner. The greatest innovation in history was not the iPhone or the semiconductor. It was the middle class. We had 7 million men come home from war. They demonstrated heroism, they were fit, we put money in their pockets through the GI Bill, National Transportation Act, FHA loans, and they were attractive. They made it, they created a ton of kids. And then these loving, secure households decided, “Why wouldn’t we bring women and non-whites into this incredible prosperity offered to us by this unbelievable operating system called America with all sorts of wonderful civil rights?”

We need to level up young people dramatically. We need a tax holiday, alternative minimum tax on corporations of at least 30%, 40% on people making more than $10 million because they get no incremental happiness from money above $10 million. And we need a tax code that levels up young people. 7 million houses, manufactured houses, which are 30 to 50% less expensive than houses built on site in the next 10 years. Dramatically bring down the cost of housing, dramatically bring down the cost of education. If you have an endowment over a billion dollars, you’re not growing your freshman class faster than population, you lose your tax-free status because you’re not a public servant. You’re a hedge fund with classes.

Every person in America under the age of 40 should they desire, should have the opportunity, the venues and the economic wherewithal to do what is the most rewarding thing in most of our lives. And that is develop a deep and meaningful relationship with someone else and then have children. And if you decide not to do it and spend that money on brunch and St. Bart’s, more power to you. But everyone should have the economic wherewithal.

And right now, in the most prosperous wealthy nation in the world, 40 years ago, 60% of people at the age of 30 had a kid. Now it’s 27%. And is it because they’ve decided they don’t like kids, so they don’t want to partner with somebody? No, they don’t have the money. The old in this country continue to vote themselves more money. America has become an operating system for transferring money from the bottom 99 to the top 1, and it needs to stop. The unifying theory of everything is love and prosperity. Everyone under the age of 40 should have a reasonable shot in meeting someone, mating, having kids, and being able to deepen those relationships with somewhat of an absence of economic stress.

Preet Bharara:

I would just add you should have that opportunity after 40 as well.

Scott Galloway:

Agreed.

Preet Bharara:

As we live longer and longer and longer. You said a lot of interesting, provocative things as always, Scott. I don’t have the time to follow up on a number of them and interrogate you on some of them, but I appreciate your flooding the zone with innovation and ideas and I’ll always take your call, sir.

Scott Galloway:

I appreciate that. I’ll hold you to it.

Preet Bharara:

Because I don’t have particularly high standards about the conduct of a client for good or ill. Everyone-

Scott Galloway:

Keys for my lawyers and my romantic partners.

Preet Bharara:

You have a Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

Scott Galloway:

There you go.

Preet Bharara:

And we have a tradition of you can choose whatever counsel you want. Scott Galloway, it’s always a treat. Thank you so much.

Scott Galloway:

Likewise, Preet. Congrats on all your success.

Preet Bharara:

For more analysis of legal and political issues making the headlines, become a member of the CAFE Insider. Members get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I host with former U.S. Attorney, Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com/insider to sign up for a trial. That’s cafe.com/insider.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.