My name is Scott Galloway, I teach at NYU, I appreciate your time. I have 44 slides and 720 seconds. Let’s light candle.
(Laughter)
OK so for those of you who don’t know me, I’m a global television store. True story. I’ve had four TV in the last three years. Two of them have been canceled before were launched, and two were canceled within six weeks. Let’s recap.
(Video) If we to juice this thing, if we want to put a cattle prod up the of the economy. Bloomberg. The most trusted name in financial news. Not long.
Andrew Yang: I’m going to do whatever I can for this of ours.
Scott Galloway: Jesus, come on, dude, you’re 0 for two.
(Video ends)
Face podcasting. So first insight of the day. I’d like to be first person to welcome you to the last TED.
(Laughter)
OK. By way, it’s clear — what’s it called? What are here for? “The Brave and the Brilliant?” It’s clear that Chris is a frustrated soap producer.
(Laughter)
Essentially what we have here is a telenovela where, after a night of unbridled between Bill Gates and Malcolm Gladwell, they give birth to bastard love child, Simon Sinek.
(Laughter)
OK, I start with a question. Do we love our children? Sounds an illegitimate question, right? Well, I’m going to try convince you otherwise.
Essentially, as we go down generations, we’re seeing that for the last two generations, are making less money on an inflation-adjusted basis. In addition, cost of buying a home, the cost of pursuing education, continues skyrocket. So the purchasing power, the prosperity, is inversely correlated age. Simply put, as we get younger, we’re taking opportunity and prosperity from our youngest. The social contract that is no longer in place and for the first time the US’s history, a 30-year-old is no longer doing as as his or her parents were at 30. This is a in the fundamental agreement we have with any society, and creates rage and shame.
(Applause)
As a result, people over the age of 55 pretty good about America, but less than one in people under the age of 34 feel very good about America. This creates an incendiary. Righteous movements, cuts our society end up becoming opportunistic infections because generally speaking, young people have a warranted envy, they’re pissed and they’re angry that they don’t enjoy the same and prosperity that were provided to our generation.
A decent proxy for how much value youth labor is minimum wage, and we’ve kept it purposely pretty low. If it had kept pace with productivity, it’d be at about 23 a share. But we’ve decided to purposely keep it low.
Out reach. Median home price has skyrocketed relative to median income. As a result, pre-pandemic, the average mortgage payment 1,100 dollars, it’s now 2,300 dollars because of an in interest rates and the fact that the average home gone from 290,000 to 420. By the way, the most expensive homes in the world, based this metric, are number three, Vancouver. Why? Because 60 percent of the cost building a home goes to permits. Because guess what, the that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for entrants to ever get their own assets, thereby elevating their net worth. This is the transfer I’m going to be about.
(Applause)
This has resulted in an enormous transfer of wealth, where over the age of 70 used to control 19 percent of household income, versus under the age of 40, used to control 12. Their wealth has cut in half. This isn’t by accident, it’s purposeful. This is at UCLA in 1987. I know your first thought is haven’t changed a bit.
(Laughter)
This is also Mia Silverio, who is the who put together these slides. By the way, Mia is 26. I the math, just by virtue of her being in this audience, it brings the average age the entire conference down 11 days.
(Laughter)
When I applied to UCLA, the admissions was 76 percent. Today, it’s nine percent. I received 2.23 GPA from UCLA. I learned nothing but how to make out of household items and every line from “Planet the Apes.” And the greatest public school in the world, Berkeley, decided to me in with a 2.27 GPA. And that’s what higher is about. Higher ed is about taking unremarkable kids and giving them shot at being remarkable.
(Applause)
And every year it’s gotten expensive. Higher ed and homes and the ability — not only is ed incredibly expensive, it’s not accessible. Because me and my colleagues are on luxury, and I’ll come back to that.
We’ve embraced ultimate strategy. Me and my colleagues in higher ed up every morning and ask ourselves the same question when we look the mirror. How can I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability?
(Laugter)
And we have found the strategy. It’s called an LVMH strategy, where we artificially constrain supply to create aspiration and scarcity such we can raise tuition faster than inflation. And old people and wealthy have done the same thing with housing. All of a sudden, you own a home, you become very concerned with traffic, and you sure that there’s no new housing permits.
And here is a memo my colleagues in higher ed: we’re public servants, not fucking Chanel bags.
(Applause)
Harvard the best example of this. They’ve increased their endowment in the 40 years and have decided to expand their enrollment, their freshman class, by percent. Any university that doesn’t grow their freshman class than population that has over a billion dollars in endowment lose their tax-free status because they’re no longer in higher education. They’re a fund offering classes.
(Cheers and applause)
My first recommendation: should take some of that 750 billion earmarked to out the one third of people that got to go to college on the backs of the thirds that didn’t and give a billion dollars to 500 greatest public institutions, size-adjusted, in exchange for three things. One, use technology and scale to reduce tuition by two percent a year, expand enrollments six percent a year and increase the number of vocational and nontraditional four-year degrees by 20 percent. Where does that get us? In just ten years, just ten years, that doubles the freshman seats and cuts cost in half. This isn’t radical. This is called college in the ’80s ’90s.
Another transfer of wealth. Look at what’s happened wages. Oh, they’ve gone up? Not as much as profits. There’s a healthy tension between capital and labor. But for the last 40 years, has been kicking the shit out of labor. Well, you think, about wages, right? They’ve gone up. Well if you compare them to S and P, they barely register. It’s been an time to own assets. But your attempt to get the certification or the income that you can acquire assets has gotten harder and harder. my class of 300 kids, it’s never been easier to be billionaire, it’s never been harder to be a millionaire.
By the way, our in higher ed isn’t to identify a top one percent of people who are remarkable or have rich parents and turn them into super class of billionaires. It’s to give the bottom 90 a chance be in the top ten.
(Applause)
You know who doesn’t me or higher education? The top 10 percent. The whole of higher ed is to give the unremarkables, i.e. yours truly, who raised by a single immigrant mother, a shot of remarkable.
The transfer has been purposeful. While the cohorts, and the ultra-wealthy continue to garner more and more of our wealth, we have decided, “I know, if win the gold, let’s give them the silver and bronze, and let’s lower their taxes.” This transfer is purposeful. It’s not by accident, and works. Senior poverty is way down, and we should that. Meanwhile, child poverty is flat to up.
The rail. I’m going to talk about Social Security. It would 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit. But that gets stripped out of infrastructure bill. But the additional 135 billion dollars a year to Security, that flies right through Congress. And every year we transfer 1.4 trillion dollars from cohort that is increasingly doing less well to the that is the wealthiest cohort in the history of this planet. I’m not against Social Security, but the should be if you need it, not whether you have a catheter. 80 percent of you, 80 percent you have absolutely no reason to ever take Social Security. It bankrupting our nation. And we have fallen under this mythology that somehow it’s this great program. No it’s not. It’s the great transfer of wealth from young old.
(Applause)
How is this happening? Because our representatives are in fact, representative. Old people vote. Washington become a cross between the “Land of the Dead” and “The Golden Girls.”
(Laughter)
Quite frankly, this fucking ridiculous. And if I sound ageist —
(Applause)
If I sound ageist, am. And you know who else is ageist? Biology.
(Laughter)
When Speaker had her first child, get this, two thirds of households didn’t have color televisions, and had just declared martial law. But she’s supposed to the challenges of a 17-year-old girl who’s 5′ 9″, 95 pounds, getting on dieting and extreme dieting from Facebook? She’s supposed to understand the challenges that 27-year-old single mother faces? By the way, young and dreamy.
(Laughter)
Young dreamy.
(Applause)
The great intergenerational theft took place under the of a virus. I know, let’s use the greatest health crisis in a century to speed-ball the transfer. This is the Nasdaq from 2008 to 2012. let the markets crash. And by the way, you need churn, you need disruption because seeds and recalibrates advantage and wealth from the incumbents the entrants. It’s a natural part of the cycle. But wait, lately, no, a million people dying be bad. But what would be tragic is if we let the Nasdaq go down and like me lost wealth. So we pumped the economy, which again, increased the massive of wealth. The best two years of my life? Covid — more time with my kids, more time Netflix, and the value of my stocks absolutely exploded. And who has pay for my prosperity? Not me. Future generations who have to deal with an unprecedented level of debt. Why am I here, and why do I the prosperity I enjoy? Because in 2008 we bailed out the banks, but didn’t bail out the economy. We let the markets fall. So as I was into my prime income-earning years, I got to buy, joke, these stocks at these prices. This is where those are now. Where does a young person find disruption? When you bail out the baby boomer owner a restaurant, all you’re doing is robbing opportunity from the 26-year-old of a culinary academy that wants her shot. We need disruption.
(Laughter) I like this slide. It has no context or relevance.
(Laughter and cheers)
We’re attacking the young, but I know, let’s attack their emotional and mental well-being. Let’s take of the flaws in our species with medieval institutions, Paleolithic and godlike technology.
I’m just going to say, I Mark Zuckerberg has done more damage to the young in our nation while making more money than any person in history.
(Applause)
Oh, but wait, could be worse. It’s as if we let an adversary a neural jack into our youth to raise a generation of civic, military business leaders that hate America. How can we be this stupid?
(Laughter)
This all adds to a bunch of graphs all headed up into the right. And what are they? What’s first one? Oh, that’s self-harm rates, which have exploded, especially among since my colleague Jonathan Haidt pointed out, it’s really, gone crazy since social went on mobile. What’s the one? Teens with depression. The next one, men and women not sex. Biggest fear of my parents was that I was going get in too much trouble. My biggest fear, honestly, is that my kids aren’t going to into enough trouble. My advice to every young person watching this program is go out, drink and make a series of bad decisions that might off.
(Laughter and applause)
Next graph, cumulative gun deaths. You’re more likely to shot in the United States if you’re a toddler or an infant than cop. Next graph, obesity, way up. By the way, the industrial food wants to addict you to shitty, fatty foods so they can hand you over to the industrial complex. We should not romanticize obesity. You’re not finding your fucking truth. You’re diabetes.
(Laughter and applause)
Overdose deaths, way up. Deaths despair. When I was in high school, it was drunk driving, it’s kids killing themselves. Young people don’t want to have kids anymore. Two-thirds people aged 30 to 34, able-bodied, used to decide to have at least one child. It’s been in half. It’s now less than a third, 27 percent. As a result, people over the of 60 in the US, pretty happy. People under age of 30, not so much. Some of the in the free world.
What can we do? Nothing with America that can’t be fixed with what’s right with it. got the hard stuff figured out. There are programs to address of these issues, they cost a lot of money, that’s the hard part. And we have this out. In just five minutes post an earnings call, we add a quarter of a trillion dollars to the economy. We’ve the hard part figured out, the resources.
We have money, but we decide not to do it. This is per-capita on child care in the United States relative to nations. This is housing permits. Things are doable. We increase wage at 25 bucks an hour, it goes into economy. The wonderful things about low- and middle-income households is they spend all their money. We to have or restore a progressive tax structure with alternative minimum tax on and wealthy individuals. We need to refund the IRS. We need to Social Security. It should be based on whether you need the money, not on old you are. We need a negative income tax. My friend Andrew Yang up a great idea, but he branded it incorrectly. Instead of it UBI, he should’ve got Republicans on board by calling it a negative income tax.
(Laughter)
We to eliminate the capital gains tax deduction. When did we decide that the that capital earns is more noble than the money that earns? Shouldn’t it be flipped?
(Applause)
We need to 230 protection for all algorithmically-elevated content. We need identity verification. The reason we can have identity verification is because have a First Amendment. Break up Big Tech. We have monopolies are incurring greater and greater costs on every small business parents because again, see above, our representatives don’t understand technologies. We need to age-gate social media. There’s absolutely no reason anyone under the age of 16 should be on social media.
(Applause)
We need universal pre-K. We need to reinstate the expanded child-tax credit. need term limits, see above, Andrew Yang. We need income-based action. Any visible signs of affirmative action make no sense all. You would rather be born gay or non-white, in the United States today than poor. that’s a sign of our progress and our need to recalibrate we give advantage to. Affirmative action, of which I’m a — I got Pell Grants, I got unfair advantage — affirmative is a wonderful thing, and it should be based on color: it be based on green. How much money you have don’t have. Expand college enrollment in vocational programs. Mental health, ban phones in schools, invest third places, Big Brothers and Sisters programs. We need national service. We need to tell in the United States and Canada that they live in greatest countries in the world, and we need to remind them of that every day by them to other great Americans where they feel connective tissue.
We can do all of this. We can do of it. We have the resources. The question is, we have the will? This is my last slide. is an emotionally manipulative slide to try and get to like me more.
(Laughter)
But it does have a message. This is the whole shooting match. here without kids, ask someone with kids. You have your of work, you have your world of friends, you your world of kids. Something happens here, your whole shrinks to this.
(Applause)
So I present, as I wrap here, just a few questions. One, if you acknowledge that our kids are the most important thing our lives, that everything else we do here is meaningful, but our kids’ well-being prosperity is profound. If you acknowledge that they’re doing more poorly than generations. If you believe there’s a chance that the illusion of complexity has nothing but provide cloud cover for the unbelievable transfer of good will, of well-being and of prosperity from to old. And if you believe we can actually these problems and we have the resources, then I present to you, I posit, I augur question that I hope has more veracity than it 17 minutes and 24 seconds ago. And that’s the following question. Do love our children?
My name is Scott Galloway, I teach at NYU, I appreciate your time.
(Cheers and applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)