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Media Roundtable

Episode 4: Norm Pattiz, Chairman and CEO of PodcastOne & founder of Westwood One.

Welcome to Episode #4 of Oxford Road Presents: Media's New Deal! This week, Dan speaks with Norm Pattiz, Chairman and CEO of PodcastOne & founder of Westwood One. Mr. Pattiz gives Oxford Road the most in-depth interview on the details of PodcastOne's recent acquisition by LiveXLive and what it means for the future of Podcast.

The James Altucher Show
01:05:43 9/26/2022

Transcript

The nation's favorite car buying site, Dundeele Motors, is home to the largest range of new and premium used cars from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. That's why you'll find Brady's Mercedes Benz on Dundeele. Visit the Brady's Mercedes Benz showroom on Dundeele to find your next car. Dundeele Motors, for confident car buying and deals to feel great about from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. Visit Dundeele.ie today. A 100 charts that define America. For instance, what percentage of population are living in households below the global poverty line comparing 1981 to today? Have there been increases in life expectancy and what have they been since 1960? Percentage of 30 year olds earning more than their parents did when they were 30. These charts and more discussed with Scott Galloway who's been collecting all the data and sharing all the charts. Here it is. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. So, Scott, I thought you were living in New York City teaching at NYU. Why now you taught me to live in London. You know, it makes no sense. The honest reason is why did we move to London? Because we can. I've always wanted to live in Europe, and, my partner is from Europe. I want my kids I I say out of Florida, not because we didn't love Florida, but I would like them to experience something different. We're huge Premier League Soccer fans, and I try to look at everything, James, through the lens of the what I call the deathbed test, and that is when I'm near the end and I look back on all my decisions. I just don't think I'm gonna say, oh, I f**ked up moving to Europe. Even if we don't like it and we move back, I want that experience, and I have the resources to do it. It made no sense to move to New York 20 years ago. I did that, and it was wonderful. Made no sense to move to Florida 10 years ago. Did that and loved that. So, yeah, Europe, here we come. Yeah. No. I my step kids grew up in Ghana, China, and Kuwait, and I could see it's it's been a wonderful experience for them to just live abroad and and get that experience. So if you could do it, that's great. We're really excited. And, and not only that, London right now, I mean, I know what a fan you are of of cities, and you comment a lot. You're sort of a I think you have a feel for New York and what's good and what's bad about it. London has had, because of very boring private property laws passed under the Blair administration, has had such an inflow of capital. I've been going to London 4 or 5 times a year since I was, you know, 7 because my parents are from there. It's had what I would call the 5 or $7,000,000,000,000,000 facelift over the last 4 years. The food was not good in the eighties. The architecture was not arresting. Both of those things are spectacular now. It's just a world class city. I was going to London a lot before COVID and also in the eighties, and the food was disgusting in the eighties. And now it's great. Like, I guess because, the Chunnel also allows for a lot of more intercommerce between countries. So chefs go up to London. Yeah. And I also I I love the British. They're I think they're our brothers and sisters in arms. I don't think we'll ever have a stronger alliance than we do with the with the UK. I I think rule of fair play, I think they're I love the music. I just I like it over there. I'm a bit of a a fan. So, Scott, your latest book, Adrift, America in 100 Charts, I feel like it's been a little depressing, this book. Oh, did you get through it? Yeah. Look, I'm naturally a pessimist. I'm a glass half empty kind of guy. Every presentation I give, I force myself to do a a section on silver linings, but I do see the world through kind of gray colored glasses. But I do try to offer some solutions. I have a section called the world we made that just talks about all the incredible achievements of America, whether it's we have the same level of output in a month that we had an entire year in 1950. We're responsible for 50% of the philanthropy globally. We didn't eradicate child poverty, but we cut it in half during the pandemic with the child tax credit. Unfortunately, that didn't make its way until it got stripped out of the infrastructure bill. But still the most talented, hardworking people in the world all have one thing in common, and that is they're either here or they wanna come here. And so we're doing something right. And distinct of all the big problems we still have to work on, whether it's systemic racism or income inequality, we, geopolitically, I think, are in the strongest position we've ever been. Unfortunately, it's like the call is coming from inside the house, and I find that we're tearing or eating ourselves from the inside. And that is 54% of Democrats say they're worried about their kid marrying a Republican. A third of each party sees the other party as their mortal enemy. And It it it's funny you mentioned that chart. Like, I I was telling that chart to my kids, actually. In that chart, it says in 1960, for both parties, only 4% of parents Nobody cared. Were worried about their kids marrying someone from the other party. But now, 45% of Democrats worry about their kids marrying a Republican, and 35% of Republicans worry about their kids marrying a Democrat. Yeah. Just that statistic alone is that is depressing to me. That that I I have a saying I say on almost every podcast. Politics makes people stupid. And Yeah. Agreed. That chart summarizes a good chunk of that right there. What I shoulda had next to that chart though is that most likely, I would bet, the percentage of of parents who are worried about an interracial marriage has declined dramatically. I would bet if you asked in 1960, are you worried about your son or your daughter marrying outside his or her ethnicity, a lot more people. So I think we've made progress on a lot of levels, but that's one place we have, and I agree with you. Politics is making us stupid. But, also, another another chart shows that marriage has declined, and I guess that happens in it it seems to be a trend in all developing countries Mhmm. That people get married older or or or not at all. I don't know if that's necessarily a bad or a good trend, but, you know, at some point, we get to the level where the population doesn't grow fast enough to to grow. Like, people don't have enough kids to actually grow the population anymore. Yeah. So I the way I would, couch it is marriage may or may not be the right construct for people, and consenting adults can enter into what kind of relationship they want or don't want. But what I do think is troubling is that fewer and fewer people are connecting to partners in a meaningful way, especially young people. The number of high school kids that see their friends every day has been cut in half. The number of men, under the age of 30 who haven't had sex in the last year is almost a third. So a third of males under the age of 30 haven't had sex in the last year. And people hear the term sex, and their mind goes different places. But the elemental foundation of any society and also the blue line path to a happy, rewarding life is deep, intimate relationships. And it doesn't necessarily have to be with a romantic partner, but whether it's boy or girl scout attendants, church attendants, even saying hello to your neighbors. I have tons of charts on this. Everything is going down. We are a social species. We need to touch, smell, and feel each other. And agency is in the greatness of others, and we're losing that greatness because we're having less contact with people. We used to go to the mall. We used to go to the movie theater. We used to date. We used to fall in love. We used to make great friendships at work. All of those things are sort of under attack, and I think there's, I think loneliness will be the next cancer. I think just the number of people that don't feel connected to society is growing exponentially, and it's especially toxic or dangerous for young men who I think need guardrails, that need a boss, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, parents, male role models in their lives. Because I think our prefrontal cortex doesn't mature as quickly. We're more risk prone, and we're more prone to making bad decisions if we don't have thoughtful people around us telling us to put on a shirt, to exercise, stop smoking so much weed, be more kind, get a f**king job, whatever it might be. I think young men without guardrails is especially dangerous. I think about the attack on Salman Rushdie, and I'm like, that wasn't about the fatwa. It was about a young man living in his mother's basement who wasn't attaching to anything. The most unstable, violent societies in the world all have one thing in common. And then as they have a disproportionate number of young, broke, and lonely men, that's the most dangerous person on the planet, and we're producing way too many of them in the US. Right. And I I you know what? It's funny because I think your charts sort of build this story, this story of loneliness, of isolation, of declining intimate relationships. Even the way we meet our intimate relationships, you have one chart where it used to be through friends, that's declined. It used to be through office, that's declined. But online dating, you know, meeting someone intimately through online, that's basically the only way we young people meet their romantic partners now. And what you were just saying about young men, you have a chart, 92% of mass shootings, 92% done by young men. And the question is, as we have this so called technological innovation reach new heights, are we innovating ourselves into isolation? So now we click a button and we get a movie streamed to us. We don't have to go to the movies. We click a button and I get a meal delivered to me, and it's left at my door. I don't have to see anyone. That's exactly right. Like, it's all designed every positive benefit that we've seems to have created from technology is designed for me to just sit at home in my bed watching TV and eating by myself. So in addition, it destroys our empathy. If you don't see the homeless veteran on the on ramp or the off ramp to and from work, do you really care about that person? If you if you're wealthy and you can withdraw your kids from the public school system, and you don't go to the theaters, you go to malls, you don't go to shop, you don't go to you have your coffee delivered. Like, when people don't mix, they lose empathy and regard for one another. And then in addition, you talked about online dating. Whenever technology comes into an industry, it consolidates it. There's Amazon, then 50% of online retail goes to Amazon. All social media, 2 thirds goes to 1 player, and 93% of search goes to 1 entity. It's happening and mating. And you think, well, there's some great things about Tinder. It's an efficient way to meet people. But here's the thing. It used to be a third work, a third friends, a third online. Post pandemic, it's well more than half, and my gut is it's gonna be about 2 thirds online. And here's the problem with dating online, and I'll use both of us as an example. The way I attracted mates or sort of attracted mates as a young man is I'm funny. I have a good sense of humor, and humor connotes intellect, and intellect is attractive to potential mates. You're an interesting guy. You and I are both gonna do better in terms of mating offline and online because online is 2 dimensional. Online is, does this guy, signal resources, the right ZIP code? Accidentally, Rolex ends up in his profile picture, and he's working at KKR. And is he, by traditional standards, at least reasonable looking? And what you have is Porsche polygamy, where 10% of the men online are getting 90% of the attention. If there's 50 women on Tinder and 50 men on Tinder, 46 of the women show all of their attention to just 4 men, leaving 46 men fighting over 4 women. But when people meet in person, there's vibe, there's pheromones, there's humor, there's kindness. And so what online dating has done is it's been amazing for the top 10% of men. It's been okay for, call it, the 50 to 90 on traditional metrics, and the bottom 50% have just been shut out of the market. They get absolutely no prospects whatsoever. And I would argue it's just slightly worse for all women. And so while there's a lot of great stories about people meeting on Tinder, I think the two dimensional nature of it and the fact that everyone has access to everyone creates unreasonable expectations on both sides. And the reality is women have a much finer filter than men. And when you give them the ultimate filter, they only show interest to a small minority of the men, whereas men are less choosy. They will express interest and be more willing to have a first date with a broader set of people on online dating. So if online dating were an economy and you apply to Gini coefficient, Tinder would be more unequal or have greater inequality than Venezuela. So we're ending up again. Where do we end up with? 10% of men have a ridiculous number of options, which, by the way, leads to bad behavior, and fewer and fewer people are finding reasons to get together and find out that maybe this guy or gal is just really interesting, and I wanna spend more time with them. So I think digitization, like every and I wanna spend more time with them. So I think digitization, like every other sector, is commoditizing or consolidating mating. And marriage rates, I don't know if you saw, marriage rates are plummeting. Sex is plummeting. Anyways, I think it's I think it's a I think it's a kind of a disaster in the making, for our society. Women don't wanna mate with an emotionally and economically unviable man, and there's a lot of them right now. And, Scott, I feel like, in general, I'm an optimist. I'm optimistic about the level of innovation in our society. I'm optimistic about advances in, you know, biotech and genomics and automation and and even, you know, environmental science. But lately, I've been having a lot of these discussions where a lot of these areas and we'll talk about inequality in a second. We'll talk about science in a second and the economy. But what you're just saying now about marriage and dating and online. And, look, this is related to one of your charts about the news that there's just as much coverage of Jeff Bezos going into space as there is coverage of climate change. Now those two subjects aside, what it suggests is that the news is not the news anymore. The news has been commoditized away, so in order to be special, it has to compete with TikTok. The news can't compete with facts, it has to compete with TikTok, which is another source of estrangement from, you know, reality in society and actual real life. And all of these trends, they can't be reversed. I don't see how they ever get reversed. So, a lot in there. But one of the things that ails us or ails us or one of the, one of the maladies of the society is that, so gas prices have fallen 70 of the last 73 days. There's been one headline in the New York Times about it. When they went up the previous 90 days, there were 21 headlines. So the media is like a tyrannosaurus rex. It's drawn to movement and violence. It wants negative things to talk about. So we absolutely, you know, we have CNN has the situation room. The headline, everything's slightly better today, never gets picked by an editor. And you're right. There's huge prosperity in America. The problem, I think, is that we have deliberately chosen policies that take the majority of that prosperity and cram it into the top 10%, if not the top 1%. If your kid has a rare disorder, there's a decent chance there is either a drug available or in development that might be able to cure a previously incurable disease. If it's Zolgensma, a drug that cures this rare condition that attacks the muscles and is imminent death without this, it's $2,100,000 for 2 shots that cure the disease. But it's $2,100,000. The life you can lead in America in the top 10% is just mind boggling how amazing your life is. And there's some truth to the notion that, someone in the lower middle class I won't say low income because I think they have to deal with a lot of stress in our society, but lower middle income people today, probably on many dimensions, have better lives in a real sober study than people did 50 years ago at the upper end. They have access to unbelievable content. They can save money and go to Disney World. The problem is when media and Instagram shove in your face this notion that if you aren't taking pictures of your feet at the Almond in Venice, if you don't have a 6 pack, you have not measured up. You're failing. Everyone else around you is ripped and rich. You have no excuse. It creates a certain lack of it attacks our self esteem, this technology. So I'm optimistic. There's just no arguing with our prosperity. The key is are we making progress. And what I don't like and what I would push back on is that there's this illusion of complexity, that these problems are so big we can't solve them. I think almost all of these we can solve. During the pandemic, we cut child poverty in half just with a a program that was expensive but not crazy expensive. Amazon, when it got critic bombed for Lord of the Rings, you know, some bad actors, they don't know if it was other networks or whatever, started bombing Lord of the Rings and bombing, She Hulk Attorney at Law, which is one of the greatest titles of a new program. So they shut down the comments page. They used AI. They started enforcing identity. And before you knew it, the comment section of Amazon Prime Video was accurate and was more thoughtful and more productive. But Facebook can't figure it out. I mean, election misinformation, we can't figure it out. We kick one account off Twitter, and 30 to 60% of it goes away. Because we don't wanna figure it out, though. Like That's exactly right. Right. Well, I mean I mean, I think this was in a in a one of the charts that anger solicits, you know, more interest and more of our it's something's more likely to go viral if it provokes anger emotions over anxiety emotions or other emotions. Yeah. It's either awe, amusement, or anger. Ah, yeah. And anger is number 1. And we all have a role here. Like, what I'm trying to do I know, James, you're like, you were, like, one of the early thought leaders on Twitter. I came after you. I've invested a lot on Twitter. I have not a huge following, but a decent following. I am trying to dial down the heat. I'm trying to dial I'm trying to be kinder. I used to wait for someone to get in my face and then clap back, and I was good at it. And everyone weighs in and get likes. And and now, occasionally, I'm like, it's okay to take a hit every once in a while. Demonstrate grace. Take the temperature down. I think we all have a role here. I'm trying to separate people from their politics, not immediately assume this is not a good person or this person is not intelligent if they supported Donald Trump. I think all of us have to, have to embrace that or or or need to embrace that. I also think just because we haven't had an existential, international threat, we don't have any we don't really have the connective tissue of an external threat. We're eating each other. It's just very strange. Although, again, your charts tell a story that there is an existential threat looming, which is China. Essentially, the first even though we still are have a greater economy, greater technology, greater this, greater than that, the first derivative of all these metrics with China have gone negative, meaning their prosperity is increasing faster than ours. You know, percentage of billionaires is increasing greater than ours. It's almost equal to ours, and on and on. Their percentage of unicorns, you know, increasing faster than ours. So is that going to become an existential threat? I've always said it. I I think it's difficult for us to be morally indignant and wave our finger at China when I would argue that probably one of the greatest accomplishments, Mike, in the top 2 or 3 over the last century is in the last, I think, 40 years, China has brought a half a 1000000000 people out of poverty and into the middle cla*s. And if you judge a society based on the strength of its middle class, China, gold, silver, and bronze medal. And we have actually shed people from our middle cla*s. So what they've accomplished has been incredible. Now what's interesting is the rise of China has actually had more of an impact on Europe than on America. Our economic growth has actually really held pretty steady and has been pretty strong. And if you look at our companies, no one's lining up for the Chinese vaccines. What you've seen in terms of percentage of unicorns and valuable companies is that China's rise, if it's come at the expense, it's not a zero sum game because we all love cheap products from China. 88% of our gifts under the Christmas tree this holiday will be manufactured in China. But the if you're gonna say, if it is a zero sum game, who it's really hurt is Europe. And I think that China, unfortunately, straddles the line between competitor and adversary. And I think we have to be very careful about their intentions because I think I and the technologies here, I've gotten a lot of pushback from my comments on TikTok recently. But I think, Well, what were your comments on TikTok? I think that, TikTok either needs to be spun to a US entity. I think it's impossible to separate ownership from the product. I believe that there is no separation between the Chinese Communist Party and a Chinese company. I believe the CCP would like to undermine our competitiveness on the global stage. And as a result, when you have kids under the age of 18 spending more time on TikTok than every streaming network combined, it is an existential threat. And if I were the CCP, what I would do is I would put my thumb on the content, elegantly undiscoverable, but I put my thumb on the content of, or thumb on the scale of content that positions America in a bad light. And I think that if we're not careful, the Chinese could co parent a generation of youth that feels that capitalism is not good, that feels that our elections are rigged, that feels that we have systemic racism. So I I think it's a real threat to American security. You know, people don't realize, I think, how little it takes. Like, let's say you're right that they have some small say in the content of TikTok, which they claim they don't, but let's say they do, which a lot of people believe that they do. You just need one out of every 100 videos to express, you know, like, what you just said, a video about racism, a video about some other American problem or whatever. Just one out of a 100, and that's gonna totally change the mindset of a a generation of people. It takes very little to move the needle quite a bit, and and that's what people don't realize in terms of content. Well, so, Facebook and Google, I think that they're I mean, the problem there is that they're much more focused on I don't think they lean red or blue. I think that's a myth. They lean green. They're like, whatever makes money, we don't care. And it's not immorality there. It's immorality. China's a competitor. And, I just think so whether it's James alt Altucher or Kim Kardashian, you put out content that reflects America in a very positive light. You put out other content that highlights some of the inequities in America. It is just monstrously easy, and I think they would be dumb again not to create algorithms that dial up the negative content. And what you end up with is a third of young people think socialism is a better construct. Supposedly, 20% of people under the age of 25 think communism might be better than capitalism. 50% of Republicans think our elections were rigged? I mean, when what the easiest thing to do, they can't be Russia can't beat us with kinetic power. They can't afford aircraft carrier squadrons. China can, but a better investment is to slowly but surely just figure out ways to elegantly, insidiously, and incrementally make us hate each other. The way you defeat an enemy is you atomize it. The way we came in and kinda slaughtered Native American tribes is we figured out ways to create misinformation, so they started warring with each other. And then when they weakened each other, we came in and cleaned it up. Good cleanup. Not cleaned it up, but, like, you know, kind of our early slaughter. I think that's what's happening in the US. If you look at it, if you really take the lens back, we are still number 1, I think, by a long shot. But if you talk to Americans on a day to day basis, they think America's doing really poorly, and they blame each other. They don't blame China. They don't blame Putin. You know, they see our our enemy is pouring over the border in Ukraine and now pouring back, which I think is an enormous victory for us. But I can't understand why we wouldn't be in the streets in Times Square kissing each other when Ukrainians get off their heels and onto their toes. So I think that's a victory for democracy. It's a victory for Europe. And what we're gonna find out is it's a victory for America who has been supplying intelligence and outstanding weaponry to these brave, men and women in Ukraine. And instead, we're, like, pissed off at each other or, you know, video of AOC or Josh Holly. Yeah. Well, you you mentioned it yourself, though. We're we're it's sort of like we're we're eating ourselves from from within. Like, we're, you know, we're so polarized. We're so we're so, influenced by the headlines of anger versus awe or amusement that we can't and technology is increasing this individual isolation, on every level, it's hard to see how to reverse that. You do tell the accomplishments of America in the forties, fifties, sixties, post World War 2 Mhmm. Where, collectively, we're able to build this giant middle class that, in some sense, supported each other and and began this period of technological innovation. And, but, more recently, it's created this disturbing income inequality and has had other problems. But, on the one hand, don't you feel that sort of the decline in people living below the poverty line has, you know, been the result of some of the the the policies that have also kind of decreased the middle class? It's an interesting point, but, so first off, I find in this situation, I'm more of an optimist, than you. The reason why we had, I think, more productive policies in the fifties sixties was the majority of our leaders had served in the same uniform. We drew a lot from our military leaders in terms of leadership, and they saw themselves as Americans well before they saw themselves as Republicans or Democrats. And I think one solution is what they do in Israel and certain countries in Europe is social service. And it's easy for me to say because I've aged out, but I do think, 18 to 24 year olds, mandatory 1 year service. It doesn't have to be in the military. It can be in social service. But I think people from different ethnic backgrounds, different parts of the country, different political parties need to get together and discover just how wonderful Americans are and how wonderful it is to serve in the agency of something bigger than yourself and create connective tissue, amongst Americans. I think the lower income Americans in poverty, well, so it's it's a nuanced argument. Life expectancy has gone down 3 the last 4 years, which just doesn't make any sense when we're spending 17 or 19% of our GDP on health care. It just it it But that could just be because a 1000000 people more than a 1000000 people die from COVID. Well, and opioids is actually what's what's what's taken opioid deaths. We we lose more people or almost as many people every year, from opioid overdoses as we do from or did in the Vietnam conflict. But that's a structural decline, or it has been over the last, 4 years because of opioid addiction. But I think we could easily not easily. I people like to think, oh, income inequality is just a function of the market. No. It's not. We have purposefully taken taxes down. The the two biggest tax deductions are mortgage interest and capital gains. Who owns stocks and who owns homes? Old people. Who rents and who makes their money from current income? Young people. So almost every policy in America is an elegant transfer of wealth from young to old people. Young people have seen their share of wealth registered as a percentage of GDP go from 19% to 9%. And based on policies we voted for, 50% of America is under the age of 38. 5% of our elected representatives are under the age of 38. We start our presidential race in the oldest and widest states in the nation. So what do you know? Social Security gets the biggest cost of living increase in history this year, and we don't get the earned income we don't get the child tax credit in the inflation bill. So we we have a very democratic society, and we've decided that that old people who vote and also Maine and Iowa that determine who's president. We cater to my generation. But these have been purposeful, policies that can be unwound. Why am I paying when I sell my business, I my first $10,000,000 in proceeds is tax free. That just makes no f**king sense. And people say, well, you can write a check to the government, Scott. I'm like, well, you know what? I'm not gonna disarm you laterally. So we have made these decisions. It's not an accident. It's not, oh, these problems are beyond our control. No. They're not. We in 1970, until 1970, productivity in America and wages were like 2 snakes making love. They were just inextricably wound. Productivity went up, wages went up. Productivity went a little bit down, wages went a little bit down. In 1970, there was this uncoupling, and we decided to prioritize shareholders. Wouldn't it make sense that, ultimately, productivity and income growth would decouple? Because every unit of labor is gonna result in more output when there's when productivity increases so much. So wages don't I don't wanna say it's good or bad that wages haven't increased, but with the invention, let's say, of the cell phone or in 1970, coincidentally, it's the Internet, you know, was created, you know, with with better communications networks and other, productivity increasing tools, it makes sense that you don't need as many people to be just as productive as you were before. So so wage growth is not gonna increase. All of those dynamics are absolutely the truth, but they're the same dynamics we had in the first part of the, the latter half of 19th century and the first part of 20th century where manufacturing and assembly line technology resulted in extraordinary levels of, productivity increases. But what we did then was we shared it with more stakeholders. We decided, okay, shareholders are important, but workers and community are just as important. We had minimum you guys' minimum wage, if you'd had just kept pace with productivity or even inflation, would be $23 a share right now. So in the last 13 years, the Nasdaq, even with its check back, has quadrupled. CEO pay has tripled, and minimum wage has gone from 7.25 to 7.25. We've made these I know. And that that does seem like a major problem. But I I also wanna point out though in the first half of the century Mhmm. We had we had a lot of advances in terms of making sure, you know, women could have more children. You know, many women would have children that would that would die on childbirth Yep. Or die early. And now the the so in the first half of the century, of last century, many more kids lived and the population grew very fast. Now the population doesn't grow as fast, but the economy is growing. So the economy and technology are growing faster than the population, so the wealth doesn't really get spread around as much the way it did earlier, which kept wage and productivity growth coupled together. Again, now, because technology is growing faster, the wealth is going to that top 1%, but because you don't really have to feed as many people for better or for worse. Population is the the first derivative population has been increased has been decreasing. So network technologies will naturally aggregate more resources to the most talented people because you have access now via your podcast and processing power to a much bigger market. So the most talented, the top 1%, will aggregate more and more resources. But the most talented or the top 1% used to be taxed at much higher rates, recognizing we needed to redistribute income to the middle cla*s. The middle class is something that will not survive on its own. It's not a naturally occurring organism. You have to reinvest in it. And one of the ways you reinvest in it is with incredible r and d and massive forward looking investments, whether it's the space program or DARPA or GPS or a rail system that has enormous spillover. What I find very disconcerting is that the if you think of who's most patriotic in our society, it's veterans, and there are surveys that show this because they've invested the most in our country. And you're a father. You can relate to the fact that you invest so much in your kids that even if they're not nice, even if they're not that smart, you have invested so much in this thing, you can't help but be hugely invested in it and love it. And that's true of our veterans. What I find so disheartening about our society right now is the most fortunate, and I would argue the most fortunate people relative to their talent, is tech billionaires. These are people who have aggregated the GDP of a small nation, who are in their thirties oftentimes, and they are the most likely to s**tpost the US government. I don't care if it's Google. I don't care if it's Moderna. I don't care if it's Apple. I don't care if it's Tesla. These companies all have one thing in common. They build a genius layer of innovation on top of extraordinary investments made by middle class Americans through the fifties, the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties that was a forward leaning investment by the government. And when Elon Musk says government should just get out of the way over and over, should we have gotten out of the way when we lent him $450,000,000 for an EV company that didn't have great prospects? Should we get out of the way with our $65100 EV tax credits? I mean I mean, these companies pay a lower tax rate, and I find it just so disheartening that the people who are the most blessed seem to be the least grateful and the most likely to demean, in my view, what over the long term has been the most noble productive organization in the history of mankind, and that is the US government. And I don't understand how people this fortunate. Try and start an EV company in South Africa. Start launching rockets out of space in Montreal. It just doesn't happen. And if you go up and down I was just in LA. If you go up and down the Pacific Coast, you find these companies worth 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars. I don't care if it's Qualcomm. I don't care if it's SpaceX, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft. And then something happens when you get just north of Seattle. It stops. There's one, Lululemon. And then you get south of La Jolla and Qualcomm and and Biotech, and it stops. And you have to go all the way down to, like, f**king Argentina to find Mercado Libre. So there's something about America that works really well for a lot of these very wealthy people, And the fact that they wanna build offshore cities so they don't have to pay taxes when they're taking 60% of their revenue from the government, talking about Palantir, it just I find it so ungrateful and so obnoxious. And I can't understand why this lack of patriotism has infected our most fortunate like a virus, but I think we can absolutely change these things back. I think there's this, again, illusion of complexity that these these are intractable problems. No. They are not. So let's think about a solution because I was wondering this in the beginning of COVID. Like, I was in New York City, something like 60,000 out of 240,000 small businesses went out of business permanently in the city during COVID. And this was a very sad thing. Many I was a storefront business owner. Many restaurants and other storefront businesses in my area just shut down forever. And I always wondered, like, all these, the billionaires were posting, oh, well, I'm getting all set to buy real estate in New York. None of them actually did. Mhmm. And it wouldn't have taken much to help the employees of these small businesses who suddenly were out on the street and moving back into their mom's houses. Why wasn't there more organic generosity? It's one thing giving money to the big charities, but why wasn't there more, hey. My local laundromat shut down forever. My local grocery store, which helped tens of thousands of people, shut down forever. Why would why do you think there wasn't more generosity from the top 1% down? So I think you and I disagree on this issue, and that is I actually think you have to let the gale force winds of disruption blow around corporations. I think businesses should go out of business, and everyone says, well, this was an unprecedented event. I'm like, well, a 13 year bull market was an unprecedented event, but we didn't increase taxes on small business. I find that the PPP program was mostly a giveaway to rich people and that the richest cohort in America are small business owners. The millionaire next door owns, car washes and this cartoon of a cupcake bakery owner. My I have an EdTech startup. We raised $37,000,000. We coulda got $270,000 in PPP loans for not firing people, and we weren't and it ended up you didn't even not even not need to not fire them. None of these loans were audited. That's probably the after school program budget at a high school for a year. I I know this is because I went back to my old high school, university high school. I don't think that any small business over a certain income at all should have been offered these bailouts. I also think it's important that businesses go out of business because what happens when the 55 year old restaurant owner goes out of business, it creates opportunity for a 28 year old graduate of the culinary academy to come in and buy that business for pennies on the dollar. I got to buy Apple and Amazon stock for 1 20th of what they're trading at now in 2009 because I was coming into my prime income earning years, and the market let stocks crash. I find that the bailouts and there's a lot of harshness here. There's a lot of people who fall between the cracks. There's a lot of misery. I believe that. And I I I I understand there has to be a floor at some point, a safety net. But we should allow businesses to go out of business. We should allow stocks to crash. Because when you don't allow them to go out of business, when you artificially support the markets with steroids I I would describe us as an Elvis economy right now. We use drugs to wake us up. We use drugs to put us to sleep, and we end up fat and sitting on a crapper about to have a stroke. I think we should've let businesses go out of business, but all you're doing is taking opportunity from younger people. Because the reason I am wealthy is that I got to buy Apple at $8 a share and Amazon at $17 a share because they let those stocks crash. And I think this next generation deserves their shot, and so all you're doing when you're pumping the economy full of artificial stimulus and steroids is you're transferring wealth again from young people to old people. I agree with your opinion on the government stimulus there, but it was like, as opposed to 2009 where market forces caused the crash, this was sort of a command by the government that all businesses shut down. And so Yeah. In disregard to whether they were competitive or not in their in their marketplace. So this was kind of and and I'm not saying the government should have bailed everyone out. I'm saying the community Yep. Should have supported the businesses that were actually good because it did it was sort of unfair to the businesses that were good and performing. They couldn't be good anymore because you couldn't leave your house. Yeah. Look. I I think that's a I think it's a solid argument that if there's a government mandate that closed, that there probably is a justification for social programs. But I don't know. You know? In in during the blitz in London, you weren't allowed to have your lights on, much less have your business open, and no one was getting bailed out there. I I think that as I think as a generation my generation has become somewhat entitled that when we're killing it and doing well, it's me. It's it's rugged individualism, and I deserve the majority of my spoils. That's capitalism. I'm a winner. And then when you have this exogenous event that comes in and is, quote, unquote, not your fault, we're very good at crediting our character and grit and during good times and blaming market forces outside of our control in the bad times, we want a bailout. And I find that when you have capitalism, full body contact capitalism on the way up and bailouts on the way down, that's not capitalism. It's not socialism. It's cronyism. Right. And and, again, I'm agreeing on the bailouts, but what I'm wondering is why wasn't there more, let's say, organic generosity from from the top 1 tenth of 1% to help their local communities? When you hear about a $700,000,000,000 program to bail out small businesses, do you feel like you gotta, like, support the local dry cleaner, the local Chinese restaurant? I don't know. That's a good point. You're like, okay. The government's stepping in with this crazy amount of money that my kids are gonna have to pay for because it's all being paid for with additional debt. There is some evidence that the percentage of peoples and the amount of time they spend helping others has actually gone up. That's I think the most encouraging chart in the book is that across every region globally, I don't know if it's COVID. I don't know if it's news or or social media, but people are spending more time donating time and money to people they will never meet than ever before. But, yeah, I I think a lot of that lack of empathy you're talking about, when you live in an area that has a huge influx of immigrants, you're empathetic to immigration because you see, oh, they are like us. They get up. They love their kids. They may pray to a different god, but they like the country. They're grateful to be here. When there's an upsurge in immigration, but they live in other neighborhoods, you begin resenting immigrants. So when we retreat, as you were talking about, to our homes and our computers, I just think we're less likely to understand each other, less have have less empathy. And it's become sort of like, I've got mine, you get yours kind of a society. I don't know. There's definitely something. I I just strikes me how, you know, people can isolate themselves from other people. Yeah. We can outsource sort of homelessness to certain areas, and until it bothers me and it doesn't bother me because I spent a better part of 2 years in my house. And I'm fortunate to have a really nice house, and I get get everything brought in. So I'm kind of immune to what's going on out there. I don't see it. So everyone right now is talking about inflation, but there's also a deflation in terms of the price per quality that you get. So, like, the first cell phone was a Motorola DynaTax and it was $3,995 Mhmm. And it was £2. Mhmm. Old to buy a year. It's like like in the movie Wall Street, Michael Douglas. Now, of course, everybody has got a smartphone. Smartphone today is more powerful than supercomputers 20 years ago. So on the one hand, there's this incredible increase. There's a a deflation of what you're getting per dollar. Mhmm. But there's inflation in other ways. And I'm wondering if it's the same thing that we're kind of looking at these negative consequences of technology, but maybe the upsides are far greater. They are. It it would be take me back to the time of Ward and Beaver and the with old we were nostalgic for the past. I'll opt for Netflix and overcame. I mean, I I have no desire to go back to any other time, and we have this nostalgia and this romanticization of the past. To your point, on a net basis, big tech is good for the country. It's a net good. If you had a red button that said start over and evaporate all of big tech, I don't think you'd wanna push it. And every country in the world would take these companies with all their problems. The problem, James, is with the word net. I think fossil fuels have been a net good for our society. Even with all the problems around climate change, I think it'd be hard to argue they're not a net good. But we still have an EPA. We still have climate change. We still are making huge investments in carbon re capture. Pesticides have been a net positive for society, but we still have an FDA. So to just we I find we wanna have a zero one. We make a blunt assumption around technology and go, on the whole, it's been good. So let's not hold Facebook accountable for teen depression. Let's not question our vulnerability, our use vulnerability to TikTok. Let's not question 93% of all information being filtered through algorithms from one company called Google. No. Net? Yeah. They're great. I like them. I own their stocks. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't hold them to the same standards we've held other companies and other organizations. So, again, we digress to this throwing our arms up. These problems are too complicated to solve. Nope. We're not talking about the realm of the possible. We're talking about the realm of the profitable. That's the bottom line. So what would you do to solve them? Well, okay. We're gonna meet a bigger boat, but let's start real broadly with society. I think some sort of national service would be a huge benefit to America. I think a massive investment in young people to level up American through vocational programs. Only 5% of America has vocational certification. It's 50% in Germany. I think there's a lot of fantastic Main Street jobs that pay really well that people avoid because of the fetishization of the traditional 4 year degree. We've taught parents in this nation that if you can't get your kid to MIT and then to Google, you've kinda failed. You haven't measured up. I think we need to make huge investments in after school programs, sports, social and cultural programs for young people such that they meet and they fall in love and they develop connected tissue with each other. The loneliness is a big deal. So some sort of social service and investment in vocational programs, dramatically expand our college enrollments. When I applied to UCLA, it had a 76% admissions rate. It's now 6%. So the unremarkable sons of single mothers who lived and died a secretary of yours truly don't get remarkable opportunities, and that's not what America is about. I wanna go back to America that says the tip of the spear of American society, our great colleges, is about finding unremarkable kids and giving them remarkable opportunities, not about identifying the top 1% and the freakishly remarkable and turning them into billionaires. That's not America. Do you think, though, that the government backing every student loan contributed to the the rise in everybody suddenly wanting to go to college? Like you said, 18 year olds, their prefrontal cortex are they're not fully formed. They say, oh, yeah. Sure. Let me borrow $200,000 so I can go to UCLA now because UCLA tuition has risen so much because the college presidents all know the government's gonna pay for it, and these students are taking out these loans. The parents can't argue with the students. The students realize only later that they can't get a job that pays back these loans. Of course, now we're we're we're forgiving them, which is in itself a regressive tax because still mostly the wealthier families send their kids to college and not the lower income families. So you think even though government did this great thing of allowing everybody to go to college, it's resulted in the decline of vocational training and, like you said, the fetishization of going to a 4 year college. I agree with everything you said. So my university that I where I have my affiliation to NYU, kids have borrowed more money to attend NYU than any university in the world. They've borrowed 3 and a half $1,000,000,000 to come to NYU. And when you shove paperwork in front of somebody to borrow 100 of 1,000 of dollars and there's an NYU logo behind you and that person is 18, it's predatory. There's just no getting around it. It's predatory. And for many of the degrees at UCLA, you could borrow a quarter of $1,000,000 to get a degree from my school, Stern, and 90% of the time, it's a good investment. The average compensation of a recent MBA graduate from Stern is, get this, the average this year will be $212,000. That's amazing. What are they doing? Where do they go? They're going to work for Google and for for private equity firms and venture capitalists. And if you go to work for a good consulting firm with with bonuses and everything, you're gonna make 200 grand year 1. Google and stock option. Anyway, it's extraordinary compensation. It's worth it. Should you borrow a $150,000 to get a degree in philosophy undergrad from NYU? I don't know. I don't know. And I think there's ways around this. One, you put the university on the hook for some or all of the defaults, and they're gonna start doing the math and say, you know what? We have evidence showing that this degree can support the kind of debt that we're talking about here, so we're not gonna issue it to you. Or if 30 of the top universities have endowments that are greater than the GDP of Singapore and the UAE, then why are taxpayers bailing these people out? So there's something to the notion that we've created any bubble is a function of cheap credit. We've offered kids too much cheap credit. But me and my colleagues have also been predatory, and we should be on the hook for some of this bad debt. And, also, we need to stop shoving everything through a traditional 4 year degree. There's a lot of kids that would pay 40 or 50 grand, and maybe they borrow that money to get a 2 year degree in cybersecurity. And guess what? There's a lot of demand for those good. There's probably a 12 or 18 month degree in health tech, like figuring out how to repair all those crazy machines that we're using everywhere. There's construction. We're gonna have nuclear power plants, in my opinion, ribbon cuttings on or groundbreakings on all sorts of alternative energy complex projects all over the nation, specialty construction. If you know how to install an energy efficient HVAC right now, you can probably start at 80,000 and be making a 120 to a 150 in 3 years. That's a good living. You feel good about yourself. Particularly if you don't have the debt to to pay for it. Or even a little bit. No one has a birthright to go to college. I borrowed money to go to UCLA and Cal, but it was a total of $20,000 because my tuition for 7 years of school was a total of $7,000. I don't I think it's okay that I had to work. I I want I remember one summer living off of bananas and milk and top ramen. I thought that was good for me. It was okay to borrow a little bit of money. But it's gotten so expensive, and we kinda prey on the hopes and dreams of the middle class to transfer 1 and a half $1,000,000,000,000 to the endowments and faculty of universities such that every day, me and my colleagues can wake up and answer the question we ask ourselves every day. How do I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability? And we have found the ultimate business model. We position ourselves as luxury brands, and we constrain supply such that it creates this aspirational LVMH like feeling. Kids then get arbitraged down to 2nd tier schools. We are a cartel that is more corrupt in terms of pricing than OPEC, and kids end up paying a Mercedes price tag for a Kia product. It's predatory, full stop. But I feel all of this might have started with good intentions, which is I agree. And I'm I'm going back to the the GI bill in in 19 47 or 46, which, you know, basically paid for the education of all returning veterans, which I fully would support even if it were if I was back there in the 19 forties. These are people who risked their lives for their for their country and to perform valuable service for their country. Of course, we wanna help them get health care, get an education, get a good job, go back into society. But this led to all the student loan laws in the sixties and which has led to the current the easy credit and the current situation now. I wonder how complicit, you know, government collectively doing something for the middle classes seems like a good thing, and I like it. But then on the other hand, it could get to these extremes where we're now in trouble. Yeah. But we're we're smart enough to figure this out. And you're right. It's somewhat of an investment in the middle class, but when you're 77 times more likely to get into an elite university if you come from a top 1% income earning household than if you don't, It is college has become kind of the playground of 2 cohorts. The kids are rich people and the freakishly remarkable. And, also, the cancer here, the tumor is student debt, but the cancer, the underlying disease, is that the costs have just gone up too much. When I went to UCLA, it was a s**tty campus. The buildings were outdated. You know, it was you sat in wooden chairs, and it was cheap. Now it looks like and now it looks like the Four Seasons Bel Air, the Rolexification of these places, incredible, and also these departments that spring up everywhere. We have departments in leadership and ethics. I don't think I can get my 14 year old to be ethical. I think he's already sort of baked. I'm gonna try, but I'm gonna teach a 27 year old how to be ethical. So we keep creating these departments that have no accountability. There's no measurable outcome. So I can think big thoughts as a faculty member, make a couple of $100 a year, have staff around me, have amazing benefits, and there's no measurable outcome. We have diversity and inclusion departments in the most diverse and inclusive places on the planet. And as we are fortunate enough to bring in more people from diverse backgrounds, we need to make a greater investment in ensuring they stay in school. I'm all down with that. But what measurable outcomes are there around these departments? And I I know this as a faculty member. Once these departments and costs are there, they never go away. And they're nice people doing interesting work. And by the way, if you were to ever question the economic viability of the leadership and ethics department or, god forbid, a diversity and inclusion department, you're sanctioned as a you're immediately labeled a bigot and sanctioned. Right. And so what do we have? The administrative blow to these campuses, and the cost is just so crazy that we have to charge kids $72,000 a year in tuition to attend NYU. My class, and I I have no moral clarity here, I taught 300 kids during COVID on Zoom. They each pay $7,000, James, to take my cla*s. So $2,100,000 transferred from young people to NYU, much of it paid for in debt, to listen to me do this 12 nights in a row. There's just something wrong about that. Right? A $170,000 a night? I'm good at what I do. Some nights, I'm great. That's just wrong. And so we have to go after the the the cancer here has cost, and I would have taken some of that forgiveness money and said, alright. We need a grand bargain with our public universities, which educate 2 thirds of our kids. We will pay for you to scale. That's gonna be technology. That's gonna be infrastructure so you can increase your freshman enrollment 6% a year. At the same time, with the use of technology, and because we're gonna finance this, we need you to decrease tuition 2% a year. Where does that get us in 10 years after inflation? Double the enrollments and opportunities for young people to get into a good college, a good public university at half the price. Shouldn't be free. I hate the Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren free college. That's stupid. That's a transfer of wealth to the rich. But we need to make it much more affordable, and we need to also more than affordability, it's it's accessibility. How do you get into these schools? How do you get into the good schools? There's no reason we can scale Salesforce 40% a year, and no one's like, well, it's gonna ruin the brand. But if we grow UCLA or Stanford more than 0.4%, they're like, it's gonna ruin the brand? No, it's not. Harvard lets in 1500 students. A good Starbucks serves more people than Harvard lets in, and they have an endowment that if you stacked in a $100 bills, the Virgin Orbital 1 couldn't clear it. It would run into that stack of 100. It's just insane that we aren't scaling these universities and providing more access to unremarkable kids. And, again, this is back to this fetishization. We think that America is about identifying remarkable young people and then turning them into billionaires. That's not f**king America. America's identifying unremarkable kids. I remember the call I got from UCLA when I applied for a second time. 76% admissions. I didn't get in. My dad's like, no problem. No problem. I got a job from installing shelving at these new developments out in the Inland Empire. I used to get in my Volkswagen Rabbit and head out to the to Ontario, and it it was literally in a closet for 8 or 10 hours, making $18 an hour, which felt like a lot of money back then installing shelving. A lot back then. It was. It felt good. And then my only thing but I was in a closet all day installing shelving. And my only thing I really look forward to is I'd get ridiculously f**king high with my coworkers and then take to the highways of the Inland Empire and drive home. And I remember saying to my mom I was living with my mom, like, this is it? Like, this is it? That this is, like, we're this is my life. I'm in a closet all day, and there's nothing wrong with that work, but I had bigger aspirations. And so I applied. I appealed. And my mom said, well, is there an appeal process at u l UCLA? I applied, and I told them the truth. Son of a mother's a secretary. I wanna do great things. I wanna be in education. I wanna get educated, and I'm gonna be installing shelving for the rest of my life. I don't have a vision for what to do. And I remember this person in the admissions department called me and said, you're not qualified, but you're a native son of California. We're gonna give you a shot. Changed my life. That to me is what America is. And and I worry that a lot of our public institutions have said, no. Our job is to find the remarkable. And guess what? No institution or bloodline can predict greatness at an 18 year old. I can prove to every parent that 99% of your children are not on the top 1%. And we need to start re you know who doesn't need college? The kids of rich people. They got connections. They likely had a great education. Most rich kids coming out of great schools, I think my kid, who has the benefit of great education, my 15 year old, is gonna graduate high school much better educated than I graduated UCLA. I think just as a general rule, or if you call it gestalt, fall back in love with the unremarkable. And higher ed needs to dramatically expand access. And again, a lot of this, I think, has been related to to government policies. What do you think on the flip side where you have private industry, like Google now paying for, creating this Google certificates program? So I can sign up for classes at Coursera on cybersecurity for $49, get some Google certificate in cybersecurity, and there's a a willing population of companies willing to hire me, able to hire me because I have these Google certificates. Could private industry start, because they have so much excess wealth now, could they start providing filling in some of these holes where government's been lacking? I think Google certificates is outstanding, and there's just so much great data coming out of that. They're getting jobs at $85,000. The majority of them don't have traditional college degrees. Many of them come from lower middle it's wonderful, and I think Google should be commended for it. I think waiting on the private sector's better angels to show up. I think there'll be some well publicized examples such as Google certificates, but I do think the government plays a role here. And I think our public universities, whether it's Michigan or University of North Carolina or Florida, Florida State's gonna graduate more kids this year than the entire Ivy League combined. But we also have to recognize college isn't for everybody, granted, but maybe a 1 or 2 year vocational program is. Yeah. Maybe if you say, you know what? I don't love college. It's not what I wanna do. I don't wanna borrow this kind of money. I need to make money right away. I need to help out a sick parent, or I just don't like school. A lot of kids just don't like school. Okay. Do you think you could suck it up? And, oh, maybe show some math too for math and figure out like, get a 1 year intensive degree in cybersecurity. Are you handy? Are you good with your hands? We gotta construct all sorts of s**t in this country from the infrastructure bill. Do you wanna do an apprenticeship? We pay for it. Maybe even borrow some money. But we got this great on ramp to the middle cla*s. Instead, it's like, okay. Get a degree or figure it out failure. You know what I mean? Go to work. You know? I I think we've just we've just people say they'd rather be baristas than in construction. That makes no sense. There's some great jobs and great careers out there. But, anyways, I love the Google certificates program. I think they should be commended, but I don't think we're gonna move the needle without some sort of government intervention because education is a long term investment, and it it it kinda needs to be a forward leaning investment. You know, University of California absolutely saved my bacon, and I I wanted to have I want as many unremarkable kids to have access to that kind of experience. Yeah. No. I I I agree. And, you know, so, look, between China as an existential threat, the benefits and perils of technology, particularly in terms of this increasing trend towards isolation is something I very much worry about. All of the things that are happening in in climate change and income inequality and inflation right now. Again, your book, Drift, America in 100 Charts, and these charts are great. Like, I was just just as entertainment, I was reading these charts out loud to my kids the other day because they were fascinating, and they were asking questions about That's child abuse. Call child services. Well, I do think, eventually, they all cleared out pretty quickly, but Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they thought that was a little too serious for once. But these are important charts and and, picture's worth a 1,000 words, and you've you've really you you I know you've been accumulating these charts over a a a good period of time, and it's been a great effort. Like, do you use this in in your classes that you teach? Oh, yeah. I mean, I make the majority of my income from speaking, and I was I'm kinda known for, like, if I have 30 minutes, I'll get through a 150 slides. But everything we do, it's like, can we say it with a picture? Because we had the alphabet for 1500 years, but we've been interpreting images off of k walls and, you know, off of scrolls for 1,000 of years. So we we can absorb or register an image 60 to 70 times faster than words. So they're really powerful, and I I love them, and I find they're harder. You know? It's like if I'd had more time, I would've written you a shorter note. A really good chart just really, like, hits you. It hits your emotion. When you see opioid overdoses relative to the Vietnam conflict in a chart, and you have a picture of a veteran, and you have a picture of a teen or an unmarked grave, it just hits people. They immediately understand the problem as opposed to reading. Also that you do a 150 charts in 30 minute a 150 images in 30 minutes? Or slides. I like to go fast with slides. Yeah. That's interesting because there's two styles of this is unrelated, but there's two styles of presentation. There's the style where you, 30 minutes and you go through maybe 15 slides, and then there's entire books written how, no, the reverse should be, the way you do presentations. Do as many slides as possible. So, obviously, you take you take that path, and I guess you find that more effective. It's situational. I I ran into Gary Vaynerchuk the other day just out, and Gary v, I I there was sort of a speaking circuit for for a while pre COVID, and I was running into the same people like, Tony Hawk. I would run into him everywhere. Yeah. And Gary v. I would always for whatever reason, the people who would hire me to speak would hire Gary v. And Gary It's funny, by the way. The one of the last conferences I was at, both Tony Hawk and Gary v spoke. Yeah. They've I they've made the cut. I'm no longer getting invited. But the thing that always really impressed me about Gary v is he wouldn't have any slides. He'd be talking about technology and social media. No slides. Just talk. And I I actually think that's harder. He's very good. He's very good. Yeah. I think it's situational. I just think it's kinda like what works for you. Yeah. Well, Scott Galloway, once again, I think this is this is the 3rd or 4th or 5th book you've been on the podcast for, and I really appreciate, you coming on. And your books are always fascinating. If people haven't read your prior books, they should go back and read those after they read Adrift, America in a 100 Charts. Everything you say is is just makes me think. I just this trend towards isolation, I wanna I wanna think about because it really is the kind of dark downside of of this service as a commodity where it just everything comes to our door. We don't have to see human beings anymore. It's it's kind of reaching its its pinnacle, and I I don't know where it goes next. But, always food for thought in everything we we speak about. Your your book's great. And, again, it's entertaining and informative, which is always my favorite. So thanks very much for for writing it and for coming back on the podcast. Thank you, James. And let's commit to getting together in person real soon. Yeah. Well, I I wanna go to London at some point. I haven't been there since 29 since, actually, 2020, right before COVID. Come on over. I'll take you to a football game. It's it's, there's no way to experience, the UK than a Premier League Soccer game. It's just it's I'm not into sports, and it's by far the best sporting event I've ever it's a cultural experience. It's amazing. Alright. You're out. I'll do that. Alright. Thanks, James. The nation's favorite car buying site, Dundeele Motors, is home to the largest range of new and premium used cars from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. 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