How Israel Lost The Story - with Scott Galloway
Just about every day we’re asked: how did Israel lose the story? We wanted to put this question to an expert in marketing and storytelling, but could come at Israel’s story with some distance. Someone who wasn’t inherently hostile to Israel but also wasn’t a cheerleader.
Scott Galloway is a Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business where he teaches Brand Strategy and Digital Marketing. He’s the host of the Prof G Podcast and the Pivot podcast, which he co-hosts with Kara Swisher. He is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous books ,including “The Four”, “The Algebra of Happiness”, and “Adrift: America in 100 Charts”.
He has a new book coming out, which you can pre-order, called “The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security.”
Scott has served on the board of directors of Eddie Bauer, The New York Times Company and the Berkeley School of Business.
In this episode, Scott talks for the first time in an extended conversation about his observations from Israel. We also discuss the future of higher education, and we talk about his new book and comparisons between the experiences of young Israelis and young Americans during their formative years.
Pre-order Scott Galloway’s new book: “The Algebra of Wealth”
Follow Scott at: ProfGMedia.com
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
SG: Shame is really powerful and when I retweet or I post this podcast on my feed I'll get a you know about a third of the comments will be you know Have an Israeli flag and thanks for talking about this and two thirds will be very pointed angry Comments about me being you know a terrible person that lacks empathy for the children of Gaza and it rattles you and what I find is when I click on most of these profiles It's a bot or it's not a person.
I don't consider myself an expert in geopolitics. I absolutely am NOT an expert on Israeli Hamas relations, but I am supposedly an expert on technology. Something is going on here, Dan. These are not even the reflections of a youth that is naturally being rebellious or has seen in Israel that I did not grow up with.
There is something going on.
DS: It is 11 p. m. On Tuesday, April 16th here in New York City. It's 6 a.m. on Wednesday, April 17th in Israel, as Israelis get ready to start their day. Just about every day, I seem to be asked by someone, usually many people actually, the question: How did Israel lose the story? I get that over and over and over.
How did we go from expressions of solidarity to In the days after October 7th being beamed in the illuminated image of the Israeli flag on the Brandenburg Gate On 10 Downing Street, on the Sydney Opera House, to where we are today, Israel being treated as a pariah. I have my own analysis, but I'm also very close to the story.
I've been wanting to put this question to someone who's an expert in marketing and storytelling, but could come at Israel's story with some distance. Someone who wasn't inherently hostile to Israel, but also wasn't a cheerleader. Scott Galloway is a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, where he teaches brand strategy and digital marketing.
He's the host of the Prof G podcast, which is part of my regular podcasting diet, and he's also the co-host of the Pivot podcast. He co-hosts it with Kara Swisher. Scott's the New York Times bestselling author of numerous books, including The Four, about at the time, the four largest high tech companies.
Also, The Algebra of Happiness and his most recent book called Adrift, America in 100 Charts. Scott has a new book coming out in a matter of days, which you can pre order. It's called The Algebra of Wealth, A Simple Formula for Financial Security. Scott has served on the board of directors of Eddie Bauer, The New York Times Company, and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Over the past few months, Scott and I have had a few offline conversations about his observations as events in Israel were unfolding. He's now just returned from Israel. Actually, he returned days before the Iranian attack. In this episode, Scott talks for the first time in an extended format about his observations from being on the ground in Israel.
We also discuss the future of higher education here in the West, and we talk about his new book and comparisons between the experiences of young Israelis and young Americans during their formative years. Scott Galloway on How Israel Lost the Story. This is Call Me Back.
And I am pleased to welcome to this podcast for the first time, my friend, Scott Galloway, who joins us from London, is that right, Scott?
SG: Uh, that's right, yeah, Dan.
DS: First time on this podcast, I was thrilled to be on his podcast, on Prof G, when The Genius of Israel came out. And Scott has just returned from Israel, and the moment I learned that he was in Israel, I wanted to talk to him.
So Scott, let's just start there, and then we'll talk, we'll talk about Israel, and then I want to talk about the book you have coming out shortly. First, General Impressions.
SG: Well, first off, my timing with respect to investments is remarkably bad, but my timing in terms of when to go to Israel is remarkably good.
I was there last weekend. So I feel fortunate.
DS: Meaning you went the weekend where there weren't 300 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles.
SG: So there's that. There's that. Uh, so thank you. I appreciate that. I think you've been much more, had greater fidelity and commitment to Judaism. I'm a fallen Jew. So my mother was Jewish, I was raised around Jews, uh, never bought into religion, I'm an atheist, and don't really identify with Judaism, but I'm trying to figure out what has happened to me, and something has been stirred since October 7th.
If on October 6th someone had asked me, what's the state of antisemitism in the United States?I would have said it doesn't exist. I would have dismissed it. I've never felt it. I've never seen it. And then the events of October 7th were obviously horrifying, but what was more rattling to me was the response in America. And what I just saw is just such blatant antisemitism, anti-Zionism, anti-Israel, whatever you want to call it - I couldn't wrap my head around my ignorance around the antisemitism that wasn't two thirds of an iceberg's volume below water, but what felt like 99.9%. I felt like so little of it was visible and my friends, my Jewish friends, had said, Oh, it's still out there. And I said, you're being ridiculous. And then when I saw some of the behavior and some of the rhetoric on campus, and even some of the way that stories are framed or the situation is framed… I just, I've never seen this type of both- side ism.
And it's actually made me question some of my fidelity to the Democratic Party based on some of the far left. But, you know, I think I've said this several times. I'm affiliated with NYU. If I went on campus in the square anywhere and said, ‘burn the gays’ or ‘lynch blacks’, there would be no need for context. I'd be locked out of the building by the end of the day. And there would be no hand wringing over free speech or anything like that. And then when I see even some of the rhetoric coming out of the White House, I think for the most part, it's been really solid on Israel… but calling for a ceasefire. And I imagine what would happen if religious fundamentalist cartel had been elected to power Mexico. And then it incurred into Texas believing that wide amount of evangelical Christians were evil and had treated their citizens poorly and abused migrants. And then killed on a per capita basis, the population affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin on the way back to Mexico took the freshman class of SMU hostage and then hid them under tunnels in Mexico, there would be no calls to save the hospital of Cancun or Playa del Carmen. We would radiate the place. We would torch it.
And people use the word ‘genocide’. The ratio of enemy combatants to civilians, it appears now to be lower than it was in Afghanistan, Iraq, in Germany, or in Japan. And yet no one's accusing us of genocide.
DS: In much more adverse circumstances. In other words, what a lot of military experts and historians point out, American, those including those who who are work at West Point who've analyzed this objectively, they say that the casualty ratio is lower than the places you cited. Plus what those places did not have, what Israel has to contend with, is 300+ miles of tunnels underground where the enemy are fighting. So the enemy is literally underground. All the civilian population is above ground. So it's even an added burden. And even with that added burden, the ratio is low.
SG: And they tend to place their server farms beneath the United Nations Relief Facility. If you think about just the absolute double standard here, in terms of the words that are used, the approach, Japan, Pearl Harbor, we lose 2,200 servicemen. Japan attacks a superior military force, the United States. We go on to kill 3 million Japanese, including 100,000 in one night. 2,800 people are taken out in 9 11 from Al Qaeda. We go on to kill 400,000 people in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we do it less humanely. We kill more civilians. Relative to enemy combatants even now if I type into Google: ‘number of people killed in Gaza’, I get 32 or 33 thousand. And my understanding is that the latest numbers show that the Gaza health ministry, which is Latin for Hamas has overestimated that number by 14,000 and also packed that false number full of civilians because they recognize that the only weapon they have after slaughtering a portion of a population with a superior military infrastructure is to get bring to bear pressure from the international community and unfortunately it's working.
And you have the White House and people here calling for a ceasefire. And let me, let me be clear. I see, as someone who's always been fascinated with World War II history, I see, I think in the fullness of time, we will equate some of the anti Israel sentiment here and the both side ism is equivalent to Nazi sympathizers in the late 30s in America.
And people, People forget that antisemitism or being pro-the Third Reich, there were a lot of famous people in the United States that had what at the time felt like rational arguments for partnering with or empathizing with the Third Reich and Hitler. It wasn't like they woke up and said, oh no, Jews should be put in concentration camps.
They found what felt at the time reasons for why the Germans had been poorly treated, we had economically impaired them. That Hitler wanted to do an agreement with England and the US; that it was time to just not fight back and to strike an agreement. And I find some of the same language and also this constant trope throughout history that somehow the Jews are co conspirators in their own genocide.
And what we have here is a group that is the standard bearer for depravity, I see, in terms of kind of quote unquote brands - is the Nazis, right? The Nazis were the bad guys in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, whenever you really wanted to get, you know, the benchmark for depravity was the Nazis. And to compare Hamas to the Nazis is unfair to the Nazis.
The Germans, similar to the British and every other nation, shipped civilians and kids and women out of military. They got them away. They didn't want to see their children and their wives and their sisters used as human ammunition or camouflage. In addition, the high command in Germany had huge task forces to try and deal with Nazis on the ground in camps that were killing Jews, murdering Jews, because it emotionally took a toll on them.
Now, I'm not saying anyone should feel sympathy for these people. But they weren't calling their parents and bragging that they had just killed Jews.
DS: And you're referring specifically to that video, one Hamas fighter. Literally, they have audio of him calling his parents saying, I killed 10 Jews. Mom, dad, get mom on the phone. I killed 10 Jews.
SG: Like the way you would call your parents when you got into college or something.
DS: Right, and what's amazing about that is, if the guy had called home and said, Mom, Dad, we're one step closer to getting our homeland, we're one step closer to liberation, Mom, Dad, we've advanced, if there was some sort of strategic goal they were in pursuit of, but no, he was reveling in the slaughtering of Jews. That was where the joy came from.
SG: It was clear these young men and most of our young men have been taught from an early age that there's a certain group of people that are guilty before they are born and those people are Jews, and my view is, okay, when you find sympathy and empathy for a group… I also don't think there's as great a sharp relief between the Palestinian people in Hamas is people would like to believe and that's it inflamed a lot of people.
I think it's lazy thinking. 70% of Palestinians support the activities of October the 7th when the IDF goes into these homes, they're finding in the majority of these homes. They're either linked to tunnels, have weapons, have pictures of people from Hamas. So the notion that somehow Hamas does not represent the Palestinian I mean there are an enormous number of victims in Gaza. People under the age of 18… Gaza right now has got the greatest concentration of child amputees in the world. It is tragic and there's a word for it, it’s called war, and whenever an inferior military infrastructure has incurred into a superior military infrastructure and committed this type of slaughter, they invite war. When the U.S. accepts, we're allowed to fight or prosecute to unconditional surrender. Israel is allowed to fight back to a truce. And then America starts using words like genocide, which is just an incredible slur.
So anyways, a long winded preamble, my trip to Israel. I have never worried about antisemitism. And when I see these echoes of the 30s, I see real threat and I don't know how much of it is my own paranoia or me getting older. But I am very committed to the survival of Israel because I think there's a non-zero probability that if this shit spins out of control, I might decide to take my family to Tel Aviv. And that sounds paranoid, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong.
I wouldn't have guessed that Trump would be elected and potentially be re-elected from jail, and that woman's rights would be taken back a hundred years. I would have never guessed that Arizona would pass a law that's pre Civil War denying a woman of her bodily autonomy. So things I never would have thought possible have happened.
And I think that the distance between here and an environment where Jews are not, I don't want to say not safe, in places like London or in the U.S.… I think it's more of a reality than I had ever realized. So I want Israel in the most potent economy, the democratic economy, you know, jury trials, scientific research, bodily autonomy, civil rights, no cruel and unusual punishment, academia, you know, no honor killings, all that sort of stuff.
I thought, okay, I want Israel to survive. And when I would talk about Israel on podcasts such as this, I would say, how can I help? And everyone would say the same thing, come to Israel. I hadn't been there in 30 years.
DS: When you were there last time, not this trip, 30 years ago was in what context?
SG: I was a kid with friends touring around Europe and they said let's go to Israel. It had almost no meaning for me, it was just, I was in and out. And this time, I mean the first observation on just a very commercial level - I am really privileged. I've worked my ass off. I didn't have a lot of money growing up. I now have economic security. I spend a disproportionate amount of money on travel. I will spend a crazy amount of money on travel every year and I have for the last 10 years and for the rest of my life. No city has anything on a purely commercial, food, fun, weather, sheer geographic beauty, a dry heat, than Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is Berlin with Miami weather. It's got a cool art scene, it's got an amazing food scene.
The people are young, the people are hot, the people are out to have a good time. There's great places to drink. Oh, and it's like 76 with a mild breeze. I mean, it's just, I thought to myself, okay, this feels like something between like LA in the sixties or seventies in Miami. I just thought this, if more people came to Tel Aviv and this goes to solutions, we need more exchange programs.
We need to subsidize tourism. They're just going to want Israel to survive and prosper. If you've never been to Latin America, you go to Miami. Listen, I always think Miami is the coolest city in Latin America. I think you have empathy for Latin America. I think you go and you think, what an amazing culture. I want this culture to thrive.
When I go to Miami, I'm like, I get it.
DS: No, it's, it's contagious. It's intoxicating. By the way, I try to bring people to Israel like multiple times throughout the year of one capacity or another. I'm bringing people to Israel for that reason, because you can't understand the place, let alone get energized by it, unless you're there.
SG: It's fantastic.
DS: It's everything you're describing, but what motivated you, but why did you say like you wanted to go now? Was this a post October 7th inspiration where you're like, I need to be there? Everyone is saying to you. You got to go you got to go So that was that was it.
SG: I wouldn't have gone had it not been for October 7th And this goes to some criticism. I'm incredibly disappointed, Dan, that more Jews aren't speaking out in America. I think it's, uh, I just don't get it. I met with the iconic CEO of a large financial services institution, and I'm like, why aren't you saying anything?
SG: He said, well, we have a lot of younger employees who don't agree with me. That's not my role. I run a public company. I'm a fiduciary. I'm like, Jesus, we were too fucking quiet 90 years ago. I mean, it's happening again. I'm with the biggest talent agency in Hollywood. I, I know all of these powerful Jews with huge platforms. And they're not saying anything. They're not speaking out. They're not doing anything.
So I thought, okay, at a minimum, I'm going to go to Israel and talk about my experience. And I like to think that I have a decent amount of influence because people see me as a moderate, they know I'm an atheist, and they think… You know, when a rabbi speaks or someone who was born and raised in Israel speaks, when someone who is Palestinian speaks, a screen goes up because you go, this person has emotional involvement and has a difficult time objectively analyzing the situation. So I'd like to think that I have some, I don't want to call it credibility, but some influence because I don't think people immediately know what I'm going to say about this as someone who is far left, progressive, an atheist, has never really identified with Judaism. So I wanted to go. And the first part of the trip was as a tourist. It's amazing. I would suggest anybody when things settle down or before, go.
I wanted to show support. And I spent a day - the other kind of flip side of the coin was I spent a day in the Gaza envelope. I went to, I toured Kibbutz Farazza. And that was obviously very heavy. And in the spirit of candor, my first observation, I went to the one of the 22 kibbutzes that was attacked.
DS: So for our listeners, Kfar Oz is two kilometers from Northern Gaza, small population, 787 people, I think before October 7th, between 52 and 68 people were killed that day and 17 people taken hostage. You're talking about like 80, 90 people out of a population of 787. We're either slaughtered or taken hostage, and it's right there, right? You see, when you're standing in Faraza, you're looking at Gaza, right?
SG: Yeah, you see it across the field, and one of the guides they paired me with was a mother who's returned, who feels it's important that people know what's going on, and you take a tour of her little home, it's probably seven, eight hundred square feet, and you see the bullet holes everywhere, she has printed out the text messages that she sent to her daughter, she wasn't there.
And I mean, it's just disturbing and horrifying and it's difficult to find the words. It's difficult. I'm not going to try and describe it, but you know, as you can imagine, you're in a place of like death and destruction and beyond the heaviness, one of the things I felt Dan was a sense of anger at the IDF and Netanyahu because I look at that strip of land and I think how the hell did they let this happen?
Because I don't understand military technology, but I understand technology, and I'm thinking -motion sensors, blimps, cameras. Why weren't helicopter gunships here in about 11 minutes?
DS: Or all the warning signs? I mean, the fact that the night before the Israeli signal intelligence had picked up that hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza were suddenly flipping their SIM cards to Israeli SIM cards.
SG: That's interesting.
DS: This will all come out because there's going to be a commission of inquiry all the signs. Not to mention what you're talking about, which is the day of and the slowness in response.
SG: But when you see Gaza from literally the backyard of these places, you would think, well, the only reason you're going to have these residences here and have any reasonable semblance of life, is a certainty or a trust that you have a competent government that protects against something like this and that those people were let down and my understanding of history in Israel is that whenever there is an attack like this, there is in fact a reckoning. And I think that reckoning will happen.But my first sort of feeling was how the hell did they let this happen, given the stated intentions of a ruling body to exterminate Jews.
The other thing that was really fascinating for me was, I went to, I asked to be taken to the crossing where they are letting in one of the, it's one of the entry points for supplies. And I saw what must have been a line of convoys that I couldn't see the end of it - all with supplies. And I got pretty close to it. And I was close enough to take a bunch of pictures. These were not fake trucks. This was not balsa wood. This was not an image. These were trucks full of supplies. Building supplies, food, medical equipment.
You know this better than me. How many people in Gaza?
DS: Over two million.
SG: Okay, so two million. Twenty two thousand trucks have gone into Gaza. That's a little less than a hundred people per truck. A hundred people couldn't consume all the food on a semi truck in the time it's taken. So my question is, alright, one of a few things is going on here.
Either this is the, like, the biggest illusionist David Copperfield trick where they somehow get these trucks across the border and do something with these supplies. Or these supplies are being intercepted and either sold or hoarded. Or there is, again, a filter through which anti Israel and to a certain extent anti American sentiment, and also to be fair, a lot of those supplies that come from UAE, come from Qatar, come from Bahrain, but this notion somehow that there's this great orchestrated starvation… I just don't see the logistics adding up and I wanted to get pictures of these trucks because again the narrative is: The genocide and starvation narrative, when I see the data says this war is being prosecuted less inhumanely - which is a synonym for war, than America has ever prosecuted a war.
So for me it was, as you can understand, disturbing and rattling taking the tour of the kibbutz, but also I just feel as if I'm learning more. I want to play a role in having what I call a no-malice view of the data around the situation and then communicate it to my constituents.
It has come at a cost.
DS: Yeah, let's talk about that. Because your audience is different than mine. So talk a little bit about that. Are you hoping you're gonna be able to persuade some of these people that perhaps are on the fence or you just feel like you have to say it and let the chips fall where they may?
SG: One of my role models is Sam Harris, the podcaster. He said if you're wealthy, or you're economically secure and you have people who love you unconditionally, you have an obligation to speak your mind. And I'm very fortunate. I have both of those things. And what I see, my podcast audience is the part of the audience that is 80 percent not supportive of Israel.
Specifically, I get very young progressives listen to my podcast. I get some moderates and some conservatives. But my listenership is very young, very sort of urban, skews a little bit male. But my downloads on my podcast are off any week since October 7th. And I began speaking about Israel - anywhere between 7 and 12 percent. Which in a world of podcasting where people subscribe and have to unsubscribe, that's kind of a not a collapse, but that's a real hit. Within a week of speaking out I lost a million bucks in speaking gigs - and I don't think it was anti semitism, Dan. They were very straight with me.
They said, look, this is just so hot right now and so controversial. A lot of young people don't agree with you. We're not saying we agree or don't agree with you, but why wouldn't we allocate our finite advertising dollars to podcasts and newsletters that, quite frankly, are just less controversial?
And I empathize with that. I don't think they're being anti semitic. I think they're just being capitalists.
But here's the thing. I'm in a position of privilege. I don't need, I want the money. I'll use it, but I don't need it. So I do feel a bit of an obligation to finally… and here's the other thing, Dan, you're politically involved. You're, I think, a little bit more, I don't know, civic minded than I am. When Hurricane Katrina happened. I thought, I'm going to get a Winnebago and prepaid phone cars and I'm just going to head down there with water. And what did I do? I did nothing. There was the pile around 9/11 - I was like, I'm going to go down there. I'm an able bodied young man. I'm going to go down and help out. What did I do? Nothing. My life has been a series of good intentions that result in like, fuck all. I don't do anything. And I thought, okay, I'm running out of time. I'm literally running out of time. And so I thought, okay, I have some sense of history, I understand data, I have a following.
The way I have the biggest impact is the fact that my audience doesn't agree with me. I'm not preaching to the choir. It doesn't do me any good. To go on my podcast and talk about, I don't know, tech is eating the world. Well, okay. No shit Sherlock. Everybody knows that, right? Or, big tech is bad or that Instagram is bad for kids. I do say that. I don't know how much impact I'm having really when you think about it, because a lot of people, my listeners already… It's self selection. Where I can have a real impact is I might lose some listeners, I might lose a little bit of money, but I think I'm hoping some of the moderates on my podcast say: well this guy seems fairly rational, it's not obvious what he was gonna say about this. He doesn't feel any real emotional connection to Judaism, so maybe I can help, you know, change some hearts and minds. So this is like for me. This is just sort of overdue right enough virtue signaling already Well, what are you gonna do about it? And I have been really disappointed that more Jews aren't speaking out. It's like that's it? That's what we got? Who's speaking outright? I mean, there's you. I mean, it's just not that many people. It's a, it's a chorus of a few.
DS: If it's just me, we're screwed. I'll tell you, Scott, I'm like cringing as you're speaking because sadly what you're describing is not new. So, one of the observations I have tried to make when I speak about what's happening now, not what's happening in Israel, in the war, but the backlash against Israel, is I say, I always thought the outrage after October 7th would be directed at those massacring Jews. I didn't think the outrage would be directed at Jews for objecting to being massacred. And then I actually look back and I say, if you look at every century, 3,200, 3,200 years, go on to Google, I tell people, and type in the word anti Semitism and pick a century, you will be shocked by what you see. It's like rinse and repeat.
It's the same thing over and over, and many of the same trends like the one you're describing, which is: Jews, in positions of power who have become somewhat assimilated, they have become, not in every situation, but in many of them, elites, business elites, cultural elites, academic elites, creative elites, and they don't want to rock the boat.
They kind of have a good set up, and they are only willing to rock the boat by the time it's too late. And I, there's a book that I read years ago that I'm, literally started rereading this weekend over Shabbat because it is so relevant, it's called ‘The Pity of It All’. And it is about German Jewish life between 1743 and 1933.
I'll post in the show notes by a fantastic writer, Amos Alon. So it's about German Jewish life between 1743 and 1933. And it basically traces how Jews, over time, among other things it looks at, achieved enormous amounts of power and influence in German society, right up until 1933. And they convinced themselves, we'll be fine, we're powerful, we're influential, we rub shoulders with our non-Jewish elite peers.
And so much so, the most pathetic part of the book is, they actually, on the eve, basically, of 1933, as Hitler is forming his government, They compile a book, like a journal, that lists, that chronicles, all the powerful Jews in Berlin and their positions of influence to show the German government. Look how loyal we are to the German state.
Thinking that if they just kind of kept their heads down, maintained their, you know, quote unquote alliances with other powerful people, non Jewish powerful people, they'll be fine, and they weren't fine. And I resist making the leap from this moment to we're about to, you know, be a version of the Third Reich.
But you do see these trends in history where Jews become very influential in the diaspora. And the dial is turning of anti semitism, and they're trying to strike a balance between being aware of it, but not wanting to rock the boat. And I think that's what you're describing.
SG: Well, I was on Rabbi Stephen, is it Leader or Letters podcast? And I asked him, I said, I don't, the whole trans debate. My attitude is, there's 140,000 trans people in the United States. One, I don't think the Democratic Party should be shifting its platform to talk about bathrooms. But at the same time, I don't understand why people are so hostile towards this community that is the size of the number of lacrosse players in Wisconsin.
And I don't understand how there has, throughout history, been so much animosity for 0.02 percent of the population. I just don't get it. I don't understand how so few people have consistently I've always found and been on the receiving end of this animosity, and Rabbi Lehder's view was, is that Jews have always been taught throughout history, successful Jews, to kind of fly below the radar.
Not to flaunt, or exercise your success, to just keep it to yourself. And I think that still holds today and is why a lot of people aren't speaking out and also I empathize if you're If you're a young person that's maybe sympathetic towards what's going on in Israel, or you're Jewish and you're an actor in media… one of the horrible things about social media is I mean, let's talk about the narrative here. If I go on social media and I post something about Biden said we will support Israel unconditionally, and I just have the quote and I put it out on threads, I just know I'm going to get a bunch of pushback.
I don't enjoy being called Professor Genocide. And, unfortunately, these comments and the overwhelming pushback you get silence you. They shame you and they silence you. And if you're still in your income earning years and you're focused on your career, which most people are, you might not have, you can understandably just sort of keep these views to yourself.
And what I find is, I get a lot of kind of what I'll call powerful, influential people texting me. “Thank you for speaking out really appreciate your views agree with you” and I write back, I'm like boss that doesn't do me any good go on social and say yeah I agree because you're a highly visible respected person and your friends We're outnumbered online and quite frankly, I think a lot of it is bad actors I know that sounds paranoid, but I don't think I'm wrong, if you go on TikTok right now for every one pro-Israel video, there's 52 pro-Hamas videos being served That is so far out of whack from even how young people feel, there's clearly something going on.
And I don't think it's beyond reason to think that similar to what we would do if we would control the media vehicle in China, China wants to divide us because they see that as a means of weakening us when they can't beat us kinetically or economically. So I unfortunately think this is a confluence of a lot of very unfortunate things and some additional things just to be even handed here.
I don't think Israel has draped itself in glory the last 20 or 30 years. I think they've morphed from David to Goliath, the over settlements, the outright bigotry we see on the Knesset, a prime minister who, in my opinion, has been overly aggressive and has been Machiavellian, and to ensure there wasn't a two state solution, we've gone from being the good guys to the bad guys.
And that, I, I don't think they've acquitted themselves well from a, what I'll call a sympathy or a global brand standpoint. Young people naturally want to disagree with their elders. Some of that is healthy. They immediately, when they see that 80 percent of people my age support Israel, they want to question it.
That is healthy, but it's so skewed. That something has gone on here. And then also, Dan, I do think there's something very nefarious going on on social media. Because if you look at the ratio of pro Israel to pro Hamas content on TikTok, relative to say, Threads or the control group being Facebook, either Mark Zuckerberg has decided to put his thumb on the scale of pro Israel content or the CCP is putting its thumb on the scale of anti Israel content.
And as someone who has studied Mark Zuckerberg closely, I don't think he gives a good goddamn about any of this other than making money. I think he will always defer to what makes money.
DS: So what do you attribute then to the difference between the two?
SG: Oh, I absolutely think the CCP says, okay. We can't beat them economically for all the talk about China was going to be a superior economic power in the last three years, they've shed 6 trillion in the market capitalization of their markets. We have seven companies have added 4 trillion in the last four months. Despite all the talk about their military, kinetically, they aren't even close to us. They spend 200 billion, we spend 800 billion, and then there's some nonsense that, well, yeah, but they get more for their money. Their carriers don't work. We have something like 130 bases overseas. They have one or two. We can deliver the violence and the military kinetic power of China in 9 to 12 days anywhere in the world. We are vastly superior kinetically, economically… much more potent political system, much more influence globally.
So if you're them and you see strategic advantage or you see a strategic imperative in diminishing the power of the U. S., what you do is you atomize them from within. And why on earth wouldn't we put our thumb on the scale of content - that slowly but surely, day by day, incrementally, imperceptibly raises a generation of civic, business, non profit, and military leaders that just feel worse and worse about their own country, America.
We have never had a generation that feels less positive about America than we do right now. And there's a lot going on. They're not doing as well economically. I think there's too many policies that transfer wealth from young people to old people. But, I also think that the social media platforms which are porous and have what I'll call amoral management, that just want to cash checks, are an easy target for the GRU or the CCP to start feeding algorithm or tweaking the algorithms or even buying ads that make young people disagree with everyone else in America - get us fighting each other. And I think this is happening on TikTok, and I think there's evidence anywhere.
If you were to look at TikTok and say the percentage of videos on any hot issue, whether it's Free Tibet, Uyghurs, if the video ratio is dramatically different than how people actually feel, all you have to do is say, what would the CCP want?
And that's where it skews.
DS: And you don't sit there saying, so everything is, I agree with most of what you're saying, but there's an element to this, I think what you're alluding to earlier, it's just a numbers game also, right? How many Jews are there in the world? About 15 million. And then the billions of people who, you know, two billion Muslims in the world, I'm not saying they're all hostile to Israel, but say some subset of them are sympathetic to an anti Israel message, and then add on different communities, and before you know it, this is a numbers driven algorithm.
And, even if the CCP is not putting its thumb on the scale, the way these algorithms work, is it just an impossible battle?
SG: So, I'm in the UK. There's 300,000 Jews, I believe. There's 4 million Muslims.
DS: 15 percent of the population of London is Muslim. I mean, you, by the way, you're in the belly of the beast. I tell people, look at what's happening in London, where I have Jewish friends Scott in London, who now it is, since October 7th, it is now standard that they leave synagogue, and what they try to do is avoid the taunting and the harassment and the mobs that form outside their synagogues when they walk out of synagogue with the Jewish community areas in London.
And those, the taunting and the mobs is usually the beginning of marches that go across the bridge over there at Westminster, where you have like a hundred thousand people. Every single week. And the stuff they're saying, it's not even subtle.
SG: So, just to be fair, and a lot of it is I'm removed. I'm somewhat sequestered to a group of people.
I know a ton of Muslims. I have actually found that one of the wonderful things I love about living in London is I've gotten to know a lot of people from the Gulf. And I find on this issue, they, we may not agree exactly, but they're entirely reasonable. You know, the kingdom was looking to normalize relations. I still think they'll normalize. What do they know that far left groups on campuses don't? I mean, anyways, I find it amazing that Jordan is coordinating airborne missile defense systems against Iran. And far left groups on campuses have decided that Iran, it was an act of war against Iran. Anyways, there's just shit I don't get, but there's just no getting around it.
We, being Jews, if you will, are totally outnumbered. And if all of a sudden everyone decided that the problems of the West every hundred years, whether it's the Russian aristocracy or a failing economic Germany, whatever it is, if every 50 or 100 years people found a reason to blame the Latter day Saints in America, I'm not sure the church, the Mormon faith would survive.
I'm just not sure, how do you survive when you're that small a population, and where I see it manifest is online. I just get so much pushback, and also I want to be clear, I'm not immune to it, it affects me, on a regular basis I think, well maybe I should just keep this to myself. Because I have an economic interest, I don't like being shamed, it's instinctual to be worried about being shamed, because up until a couple hundred years ago, if you endured too much shame as part of the tribe, and you were excommunicated, it meant death.
If you were cast from the tribe, you know, walking across the savannah, you are going to be dead. So, shame is really powerful. And when I retweet or I post this podcast on my feed, I'll get a, you know, about a third of the comments will be, you know, have an Israeli flag and thanks for talking about this, and two thirds will be very pointed, angry, comments about me being, you know, a terrible person that lacks empathy for the children of Gaza and it rattles you.
And what I find is when I click on most of these profiles, it's a bot or it's not a person.
I don't consider myself an expert in geopolitics. I absolutely am not an expert on Israeli Hamas relations, but I am supposedly an expert on technology. Something is going on here, Dan. These are not even the reflections of a youth that is naturally being rebellious or has seen an Israel that I did not grow up with. There is something going on. These platforms are being manipulated by anti-American forces. This is what we would do.
And also, I think if the CCP, I think if young people were exceptionally pro-Israel and people my age were much more pro-Palestine or pro-Hamas, I think the CCP would put their thumb on the scale the other way.
It's not a political issue for them, it's a military weapon for them to diminish the power of the United States.
DS: It's so chaos strategy.
SG: Division and chaos. There is no one who can beat us externally, I would argue America has never been relatively speaking this strong. But if the problems are a horror movie, the call is coming from inside of the house. We are the soft tissue here.
DS: Because you have spent a lot of your career focused on marketing I want to take Israel as a story. And maybe for all the reasons you're talking about now, it's, I hate to sound like, speaking from a perspective of such despair, but maybe it's all hopeless, but let's pretend it's not hopeless. So, after October 7th, we had world landmarks and monuments. lit up all over the place with Israeli flag colors showing solidarity from the Brandenburg Gate to 10 Downing Street to the Sydney Opera House.
But really within weeks, actually within days, we went from complete solidarity with Israel to, you know, Bono was performing at the Sphere in Las Vegas that weekend. And he gave this powerful statement in solidarity with the children slaughtered, the young people slaughtered, the Nova music festival. I mean, everyone was with us.
And then within a short period of time, um, Israel became the pariah. And what I want to understand, I have a few questions, but one is, how did we go from that? How did Israel lose the story from that? Israel was, everywhere I turned, in the first 24 hours and then it evaporated very quickly, by the way, parenthetically, it evaporated before Israel actually responded, right? You had those 32 student groups at Harvard that all signed this joint statement the week, the days after October 7th. Effectively blaming Israel for October 7th. No mention of Hamas. No criticism of Hamas. It was just, blame Israel. Israel hadn't even responded militarily yet, and 32 student groups at Harvard decide, and by the way, I'm picking on Harvard because they're an easy target.
SG: Oh, it happened in NYU. It happened all over.
DS: Yeah, you can extrapolate it out to everywhere. So It was like that. It was within a blink of an eye. You know, my rabbi, David Ingber, who's a close friend and a teacher, and he's been on this podcast, he once said to me, because I sometimes put myself through a thought experiment, where I imagine, what if Israel never responded militarily?
What if October, after October 7th, Israel said, we took a big hit. We're not going to respond. We're going to seal up our border, but we're just going to leave Hamas alone. You know, he's like, how would the world have responded? Would they also have ganged up on Israel? Would the same trajectory would have occurred?
Like, is there anything, he's basically asking the question, not that he was supportive of this path, but it is an interesting thought experiment. Could Israel have done anything that would have fundamentally, I'm not talking on the margins, oh, they should have handled this issue a little better or that issue a little better.
I'm talking about, is there anything that could have fundamentally changed the story?
SG: I think about this a lot. And I think like most issues, there's just a variety of factors. So for example, in the United States, we have unfortunately fallen, in my industry, academia, has fomented this into this oppressor and oppressed orthodoxy that everyone either is an oppressor or the oppressed.
And it starts from a good place, that there are certain people born with headwinds in their face that deserve help. It's spun out of control. And now you have a mentally anxious and depressed generation that goes on the hunt for what I'll call fake racists. We're in touch with American history now to a greater extent than we have been, and a lot of young people are justifiably upset about our history, and so they go on the hunt for the perpetrators. “Where do we find the oppressors?”
And unfortunately, I think a lot of progressive groups on campuses conflate the civil rights movement with the pro Palestinian cause. Because the easiest way to identify an oppressor is how white they are and how rich they are. And ground zero from a perception standpoint, whether it's true or not, for wealth and success and whiteness is Jews. And ground zero for Jews is Israel.
So you have, what I'll call, an easy target from slow thinking special interest groups on campus who immediately say this is about the civil rights movement and our non white brothers and sisters are being oppressed by the same rich white people that oppressed us. In the 50s and 60s and they could not be more wrong that there's just - when you're talking about israel, you're talking about women's rights for me where we hit an absolute low in terms of how infected we had become with misinformation, was when I saw a march in new york and there was a group of people proudly displaying a sign, ‘Queers for Palestine’.
And I thought, okay, do you realize what they do to queers in Gaza? Get someone from Hamas, invite them to the campus, and start with a conversation on your preferred pronouns. I mean, this is a group of people that would not just kill you, not just discriminate you, but likely torture and embarrass you before killing you.
So I don't, to me, the narrative has troughed and I do think it's coming back, but you referenced this before. We have a lack of spokespeople. People conflate, have conflated, Hamas has been much better in terms of controlling the narrative. They inflate the numbers. This is the first war that's been prosecuted on tiktok.
So people are seeing up front. There was a media blackout in Iraq. We'd like to think that 400 000 Afghanis in Iraq is just sort of floated away, right? Okay. Now it's being broadcast on TikTok, the horrors of war, and it is horrific and there are a ton of innocent victims. And it's an incredible indictment on a huge flaw on our species that we end up killing children to solve, you know, these disputes and these conflicts.
It's a lack of spokespeople. It's a conflation of the civil rights movement. It's a belief that you establish your progressive bona fides by supporting the little guy and these in Hamas for some reason is perceived as a little guy. I think Western media is unconsciously anti Semitic. And also, the White House - anti Semitism isn't, nobody just stands up and says, I hate Jews. They're not going to say that, and they don't believe it. But when they start talking about, we must save the hospital… the hospital is where they are storing hostages. The hospital has direct, underneath it, tunnels to caches of weapons and terrorists. And so, why on earth, how on earth did we lose the narrative of, how did it become ceasefire and save the hospital became the call sign… shouldn't the call signs have been unconditional surrender and release the hostages?
Why weren't the call signs that we in the media were fomenting the same demands we expected from our enemies after we were beating them militarily? It wasn't ‘save the hospital’ in Hiroshima. It was unconditional surrender and your Emperor acknowledges publicly that he is not a god. And there's only one retirement plan for the senior officers of the Third Reich. We kept bombing Hamburg and Dresden well after we had won the war. Well after we had won the war, and when they asked the generals in Eisenhower, why do we keep killing civilians in Hamburg and Dresden? The answer was very straight forward. They need to know they lost. And yet, when Israel goes in and prosecutes a war, in a more targeted, more humane, or let's say less humane way, they still hear calls of genocide. So we've lost control of the narrative. We're outnumbered. Powerful Jews are not speaking out. Israel has not done itself any favors in terms of the way it has acquitted itself over the last 20 or 30 years with what I would call Far-right deals to keep Netanyahu in power. I literally think he sold his soul. So all of this wraps, and then this age old go to of, I know: we have problems with X, Y, or Z. I know who we can blame it on.
I am not a philosopher. I cannot understand why this small group is everyone's go to for who should be blamed. Because they say, you know, even all the language, this bombing or this targeted strike of a senior Iranian commander in Damascus. It's an act of war. Jesus Christ, there are acts of war against Israel on behalf of Hezbollah, Hamas, every 48 hours.
DS: Right, it was preposterous that Israel is being hit by Iranian backed proxies basically every day, and the idea this is a diplomatic facility. It's a building adjacent to a consulate that was housing leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps whose jobs it is to manage Hezbollah's war against Israel. And that somehow hitting those targets was some kind of like unprecedented escalation.
I want to ask you about Hamas. You're critical of China and the CCP. And the tool they use, TikTok.. how well thought out, and I know you're not an expert on Hamas, but just watching it again from sort of a marketing, if you were like analyzing this from a marketing perspective:
Hamas conducts this operation October 7th. Conducts it in the most barbaric, grotesque, ghoulish way, to almost like an unfathomable level of detail that they also made sure to broadcast all over the world and all over Israel. It's a form of psychological warfare against Israel in and of itself. They must have known there was no way Israel could not respond with overwhelming force. Israel responds intensely and Hamas basically hides under tunnels, puts its civilian population above ground, and lets the casualties of Palestinian civilians mount as a tool of their storytelling. It's like tying, you know, tens of thousands of people to train tracks. That's what Hamas is doing. And then blaming the train, you know, for coming.
That's effectively what Hamas has done to its own population. Do you think this was their version of, “we're going to tell a story here”? We're going to conduct this operation. Yes. It's going to look ugly. Yes. It's going to offend a lot of people, but it doesn't matter because it'll provoke the response we want. And the response will lead to bloodshed and catastrophe in Gaza. And that's the story we want, and that's the story we will ultimately win.
SG: My view is they had two primary objectives with October the 7th. Well, okay, three. One was to inflict horrendous, horrific damage on Jews and Israelis. They accomplished that. Worst day since the Holocaust. But on a broader meta level, it was one, to gain empathy and awareness of the struggles of the people in Gaza. And unfairly or fairly, I'm not talking about what should be. They've accomplished that. A lot of, globally, a lot of people seem to have, they tapped into this groundswell of sympathy.
Whenever you hear the term, somehow, that rape is resistance - I mean these were the kind of words, terms, we were hearing. There was an excuse for this type of horror like, oh, how could people be so barbaric unless they had cause for it?
And then the second thing I think they were trying to accomplish was to inspire a multi front war from who they perceived to be their kind of brothers and sisters and allies around the region.
They have not accomplished the second. One, I think there's two carrier strike forces sitting off the coast of the Mediterranean, the eastern Mediterranean, telling everyone, this would be a bad idea if you do this. And also to Israel and the Gulf's credit, I just think there's a general recognition. I mean, what does Egypt do when this war breaks out? Do they come to the aid? No. They fortify the wall between Gaza and Egypt.
Canada has taken in more Palestinians than Egypt. Qatar, which has been funding these tunnels and sending funds, is talking about kicking Hamas leadership out of Qatar. There's a general recognition across the Arab nation that this group of people bring chaos and violence.
And so I think they've fallen well short of what they were hoping would be kind of the multi front war.
The existential question here that I'm wrestling with is: for some reason Israel is not allowed to win a war. They're allowed to push back to a truce, but they're not allowed to win a war. And I was with a friend of mine here who's a very famous Israeli, like, mega successful guy, and he was saying, You can't really kill Hamas. You can't kill an idea. And my viewpoint is, you can absolutely kill an idea. We've killed communism. We sorta killed fascism, although it seems to be having a second life. I think we're about to kill DEI. I would hate to be a person who has DEI in their title right now at a company. I just don't think your job's gonna survive very long.
DS: And you think that's because of the downturn, the overall economic downturn, that those positions become more expendable, uh, when companies are tightening up, or it's just that these departments have become more of a headache for corporate America than one could have imagined?
SG: Well, let me be clear. I think affirmative action should and will live on. I think most Americans agree with the notion that people, certain people are born with headwinds in their face through no fault of their own, and they deserve extra help. The key question is, well, what is the criteria and metric for who deserves help, additional help?
I'm a beneficiary of affirmative action. I'm Pell Grant. I was in the lower quartile of household income, so I got an unfair advantage. I got money just given to me that I didn't have to pay back. And I think that was the right metric. It was based on economic hardship. And if you look at the University of California, they did away with race based or visible based affirmative action in 1997 and they have what's called an adversity score.
So if you're a white kid from Appalachia, you faced adversity. If you're an Indian kid whose father's in private equity, sorry boss, no advantage to you. You, you're just fine. And one of the wonderful things about America, and we should take pride in this, is that you would rather be born non white or gay than poor in America. The academic achievement gap between black and white 60 years ago was double what it was between rich and poor, that has flipped, and this is a remarkable sign of progress and victory that we should celebrate in. But it's poor people, it's poor kids that have the greatest wins in their face now in America.
60 years ago, 14 blacks total at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. Now 50 percent of Harvard's freshman class is non white. That's an enormous victory. So the question now is, recognizing some people still face challenges, how do we identify those people? And I think that correctly, it's moving to what the University of California is doing, and it's based on adversity.
And the biggest indicator of adversity in America, quite frankly, is money. It's no longer your sexual orientation or your race, it's money. And I think that's a wonderful thing. And by the way, we get to the same place. Because on average, black and Latino households are still less wealthy. They will still recognize the majority, I believe, of upside, from affirmative action.
But DEI, with the right intentions, has more from the following. All right, women have kids. We need the species to propagate. Fine. Women deserve certain protections and advantages. I get it. There are special interest groups all over campus. Go girl, golden seeds, women in consulting. Tons of great advocacy for women.
Blacks have endured an enormous amount of bullshit. Okay, they need help. Gay people persecuted like no end for a long time. And slowly but surely, everyone, or groups that deserved protection, understandably, justifiably, that deserved additional protection, additional resources, additional sensitivity, it ended up where we are now, where it's essentially everybody but white males.
And under the age of 18, white males make up 24%. So when you have an infrastructure that is built on allocating advantage and resources to 76% of the population, you are no longer helping people who are being persecuted, you are discriminating against the 24%. And I think people on campus recognize this and go, it has segmented people, it has sequestered them from one another, and it is creating more problems that it's solving, and also, it is expensive.
There was a big study just done here in the UK saying that 600 million pounds spent on DEI In British companies had no tangible increase in shareholder value or performance, and most of these groups were seen as unproductive within the organization. I'm not suggesting we're done. I'm not suggesting we still don't need attention, but there are laws now. I think there's much more awareness, and I think the DEI, as it stands right now, especially on campus, is going to be disassembled. And we've ended up with MIT where there are 11 employees for every one that teaches. And as someone who's on these campuses, these administrative functions, whether it's ethics, I think it's ridiculous we teach ethics in college.
I can't teach my 13 year old to make his bed, but I'm going to, I'm going to tell a 27 year old how to be more ethical? It is the height of arrogance and pretentiousness. Teach them accounting, teach them how to make a living such that they have the luxury to be better people and be better citizens. It's just such incredible - And by the way, they're, these departments are never measurable. They're well paid, but there's no way you can get fired. Because if you say anything about the DEI group, it immediately means you're a racist, and, isn't it awesome to have a job where there are no real visible measurable outcomes other than quotas?
So I think DEI, I think DEI is currently envisioned as going away. Having said that, I'm an enormous advocate of continuing to give resources to people who are disadvantaged. I just think the metric should be economic hardship or adversity, relative to anything visible. I think it ends up doing more harm than good when you tell people that based on visible characteristics they're going to be advantaged over others
DS: Okay, Scott, I want to before we talk about your book. There's just one more topic - is you, you're hitting it and I want to stay on it, which is the future of universities and higher education. When I saw you in London a few weeks ago, we talked a lot about this. I want to talk about this for a moment here, especially because you were just in Israel. You were not only seeing Israel, but you were spending time with Israelis and the role of national service in Israel, where most Israelis, informative parts of their lives, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, are serving in the military. So it's national service. It's a cause by its very nature, larger than themselves. They're developing incredible skills.
It's like a crucible leadership experience at a young age. And they are also learning to build bonds and experiences with people they probably would never cross paths with otherwise in society. In Israel, you have, you know, you look at the people who called up in reserves right now, you have, you know, the son of a billionaire and the son of a bus driver sitting there in the hull of a tank together. Jews from the East, Jews from the West, you know, Jews from bustling Tel Aviv where you were, to the struggling towns of the periphery. I mean, you just. It makes it harder and harder to see one another as the other when you go through something like that.
And I'm thinking a lot about that. As I'm looking now, as my kids are getting closer and closer to the age where they're going to be thinking about post-secondary education, post-high school experiences, and education, and I've heard what you've said about it, and I've even listened to what you're talking about, what's going on now.
And I think, you know, maybe Israel's got something figured out here, in terms of, I'm not saying we need a draft in the United States, but there's a maturing and professionalizing and civic minded program that Israelis go through at the same ages that our young people go through. But what our people are going through is, having a good time, taking a few classes, dealing with a lot of political chaos on campus that you're describing, having a really good time.
But, are those the people the most competitive companies in the world are actually going to want to hire? Or are they going to want to hire the people who've gone through some version of the Israeli experience? Can you talk a little bit about how you're thinking about where the future of post-high school education is going?
SG: I think about this a lot. For the first time in our nation's history, in the U.S. 's history, a 30 year old man or woman isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at 30. That hasn't happened in 275 years. And it's essentially a breakdown in the core of the social compact, that if you play by the rules, your kids will do better than you. And for the first time on average, that's not true.
We're raising the most anxious and depressed generation in history, despite unprecedented prosperity in the United States. So the question is why, and what do we do about it? And there's a lot around social media, helicopter parenting, in my opinion, a transfer of wealth from young to older people.
But if you move to solutions, if I could recommend, if I had a magic wand and I had one thing I could just do right away, it would be mandatory national service. And it doesn't even need to be military service, it can be senior care, research, community service, whatever it would be. But, what did I see? When I went to the Nova Music Festival Memorial, I met with probably 150 members of the IDF. These kids look like they're in high school.
DS: So you went to the NOVA site?
SG: Yeah, I went to the NOVA music festival site. I was meeting with a guy there and he lost his daughter and I said, I'm gonna go find your daughter at the festival and I found her picture. But anyways, I went to the NOVA music festival site and there's a very moving memorial there with the pictures of all the kids.
And anyways, there must have been 150, 200 members of the IDF. They're 19. I mean, they just look like kids.
DS: Just so I can describe it for our listeners. So there's basically photos on like sticks, basically, all spread out the field.
SG: Yeah, it's like weird, almost like weird tombstones. And it has pictures, flowers, and there's a ton of people just going there. And you see people everywhere crying, obviously people, uh, visiting relatives.
DS: You also realize, by the way, that the place is a, it was a killing field. I mean, that's the other thing. When you're there, you realize there's nowhere to go.
SG: Well, it's just an open field. It looks like a farm field. Yeah. Anyways, but, uh, there must have been 150, 200 members of the IDF, but they're kids, they're carrying semiotic weapons, and I think, okay, think about the training, the responsibility, the lessons of moral ambiguity, the ability to work together under high pressure situations.
But also, they're outside all goddamn day long. Also, I hate to say this, they're thin. They're in good shape. You can tell there's an affection for one another. I saw black kids, Bedouins. I met kids who were Muslim. I met kids from all walks of life. And this is one great thing about the armed services. This is true in America. It's been a great equalizer. It's been an enormous proponent of civil rights. The bottom line is when you're faced with incredibly important and difficult situations regarding life and limb and protecting your countrymen, you don't give a shit what the sexual orientation or the income level or whose parents those kids are.
You want them to win. And they're outside and they're doing something in the agency of something more important than them.
And guess what? Guess what nation, what western nation? Has significantly lower levels of teen and young adult depression? Israel. And I gotta think it has something to do with serving in the agency of something bigger and doing it together.
And also, by the way, I serve on the board and I'm an investor in two Israeli companies. Where did the CEO of his company, OpenWeb, meet his co founders? In the military. Where did he meet his wife? In the military. So what do we have now? We have a group of a younger generation. If you're wealthy enough and smart enough to go to Michigan and enjoy football games, and do what you and I did, great. That's an amazing experience.
Two thirds of kids do not end up with a traditional BA. And we have the most talented, well resourced companies in the world trying to convince these people they're going to have a reasonable facsimile of their life in their basement on a screen with an algorithm.
And it's sequestering them from people, they're not developing social skills, they're not meeting mentors, they're not meeting romantic partners, they're not meeting business partners, and they feel no sense of fidelity to the flag and the uniform. And the reason why we passed so much great progressive legislation in the 50s and 60s in America is the majority of our elected leaders had served in the same uniform.
So, we have to develop more connected tissue among young Americans. We have to get straight kids mixing with gay kids, white kids from Appalachia mixing with Asian kids from San Francisco. We need something that from a young age says, there's not oppressed and oppressor here. We're Americans. So, I think national service, and it's easy for me to say now that I've aged out, but I absolutely believe that some form of national service and on a smaller lever gap years, exchange programs, but I think about this a lot, I have 16 and 13 year old boys, my biggest nightmare is they're just at home doing nothing, but falling prey to a bunch of big tech companies who figured out a way to addict them and rage them and make them feel bad about each other and bad about America, and what I saw in Israel Is a lot of young people serving in the agency of something much bigger than themselves together. It would be an enormous win for America if we could bring that back.
DS: My most recent book, which I was on your podcast talking about, The Genius of Israel - we wrote the book with this in mind, that this is a playbook what Israel has experienced.
It's a political mess Israel. It has failed political institutions, but it is a societal success story. Weak institutions, strong society. And to your point, the international happiness report just came out. We talk a lot about the happiness report in our book, but the most recent report came out.
Everyone's focused that Israel, given the year it just had between the judicial reform debates, which tore this country apart. And then obviously October 7th, which was the worst day for Jewish slaughtering since the Holocaust. Despite 2023, Israel is still the fifth happiest country in the world. That was extraordinary, but was even more extraordinary to me, is if you dig down deeper, Israel is one of the two happiest places in the world for people under 30.
The United States numbers are plummeting for people under 30 in terms of happiness. And I think that's exactly right. People live with a sense of purpose and connection to their past and future in connection to one another.
Speaking before about books, I want to spend a few minutes on the book you have coming out, The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security. So I want to transition to this. I have not read all of it
SG: You got a lot on your plate Dan.
DS: But I wanted to say, Scott, what I have read of it. I have two reactions. One: you, in contrast to other pieces you've written, pieces, your newsletter or your, or the Algebra of Happiness, this book is not sentimental. You're very clear that this is not a, I'm not going to make you feel good about capitalism. It's very, it's sort of very like, no, tochless is the word in Hebrew. It's like, very like, uh, I'm just going to cut to it. Like, it's not a sentimental case for, for the free market. I have, I'm sentimental about the free markets. This book is not sentimental. And then I want to get to another topic of the theme in the book - but why? Why the like lack of sentimentality?
SG: I think America becomes more like itself every day, and that is it's a loving, generous place if you have money and it's a rapacious violent place if you don't. And I think it's getting that way more and more every day. I don't think that's good. I just think it is and I wrote a book saying all right - by the way, this isn't a book for someone who's struggling with their credit cards and this isn't a Susie Orman, just pay cash, tear up your credit cards. This is for someone who's making, has good prospects, decent certification, is willing to work hard, thinks I'm gonna make probably decent money at some point.
But there's a study showing that you are the sum of your five friends. The most, the biggest influence on your kids, Dan, we like to think it's us or their school, it's not, it's their peer group. They become the same weight, the same political affiliation, they make the same kind of, reasonably having the same income, they live in the same place, support the same football teams.
What's different, though, is that if you take five people who are making the same amount of money their whole life, three will do okay, one will end up poor, and one will end up exceptionally wealthy. And I try to break down the strategies and the behaviors of people who manage to go from making a good living to being very wealthy.
So it's not a book on how to make a shit ton of money and be a baller. It's a book on assuming you make a good living, some of you will end up financially secure, some not, and someone in that group will end up very, very wealthy. And I wanted to understand the Delta.
It's also an attempt to, kids need to have financial literacy. I go through each of the markets, the credit markets, the stock market, the IPO market, real estate. And I talk about the advantages and disadvantages of all those markets and try and just break them down. So you have some financial literacy.
But I also tried to distill it down to an algorithm of what I have observed through research and my own personal story of how you get real financial security. And it comes down to, I think, some basics. The first is focus. Find your talent, not your passion. Young people mistake passion for a hobby.
DS: You're basically nullifying literally every graduation ceremony, commencement speech of every, like, luminary.
SG: The worst advice in the world. People who tell you to follow your passion are already rich. And the guy telling you to follow your passion made his billions in iron ore smelting. He's full of shit. Yeah. Yeah, you follow your passion. Meanwhile, I'm going to build another iron ore smelting plant and marry someone much hotter than me and have influence everywhere and have people laugh at my jokes, even when they're not funny. But you should follow your passion.
Passion means that usually an industry where there's a 90 percent plus unemployment rate. SAG AFTRA is the Union for Actors, 180,000 people. Most talented, creative people in the world, 87 percent of them don't make enough to qualify for health insurance and make less than 23,000 a year.
So, find your talent. That's what your 20s are for. Find your talent, something you can be good at, maybe even great at. And if you want to be in sports, the arts, uh, when I say art, like an artist, or music, or you want to open a restaurant, or be in fashion, at a very early age, people will tell you you're in the 0.1%.
And if you're not one of those people, then I would suggest you sequester that to your weekends and be a DJ on weekends, but make money doing something else. And so the first is you use your 20s to workshop, to try and figure out a way to make a decent living and be great at something. Be great at something.
Because whatever, if you can be great at tax law, the accoutrements, the ability to take care of your kids, your parents, the relevance, the camaraderie, will make you passionate about tax law. Mastery is a component of passion. So the first thing is find your talent and focus.
The next thing is, I call it stoicism, but it's really develop a savings muscle. And that is, just figure out if you're capable of doing what I'm capable of doing. If you want a rebellion, rebel against every company that is psychologically testing a million times a minute a way to offer you something to absorb all of your disposable income, right? It's not an upgrade to economy plus, it's an investment in yourself. And oh, wouldn't you like that flourless chocolate cake added to your order from Balthazar Baker? I mean, these companies test over and over and over a way to hit you when you're most vulnerable and get you to spend all of your disposable income and maybe more. So try and figure out early that other people aren't as impressed with your stuff as you are. And try to develop a savings muscle and gamify it if you find a partner or friends. When I was in the fraternity at UCLA, if I didn't make 3,300 over the 12 weeks in the summer, I wasn't re-enrolling the next year. So the other six guys in the fraternity, all seven of us knew each other that didn't have money, you would gamify it. We had a whiteboard and we'd write down how much money we spent. And I got to a point where one summer I spent 77 dollars a week on everything including rent. I had Top Ramen, bananas. And you know what? When you're young, you lean into your advantage. With some beers and friends, I still had a nice summer, but I was able to re-enroll.
Gamify saving money if you can when you're young. I'm not saying don't go to Coachella. I'm not saying don't occasionally buy something you think is really cool. Enjoy your youth, but at least learn. At least learn how to spend less than you make, such that even if it's a hundred bucks a month, you got to get that savings muscle going.
Then, diversification, something that I didn't appreciate and left me with my first kid at the age of 42 with a lot less money than I thought I was going to have. It was hugely stressful for me. I always went all in on one thing. My business or a specific stock, and what I found after studying the markets for the better part of 30 years is nobody knows. If I look at all of my investments, my best investments last year were things I didn't expect, and my worst investments were things I had the most confidence in.
DS: So be skeptical of the gurus like across the board. The experts are hyped but not always reliable.
SG: Well learn from them. They do have insight. But what I would say is for the most part, the alternative investments industry, the financial services industry. Anyone with advertising, it's basically a grift. Dan, if you look at all alternative investments and almost every hedge fund, almost every, unless they get very involved in the company and they have sort of an activist approach, um, or they have a lot of capital for the most part, if you took the returns for the alternative investments industry, and this is weird saying this to you, but they've underperformed the S&P by the amount of their fees.
And so if you have someone pitching you, especially if you don't have access to the best funds. If you have someone pitching you on a fund, if your broker is calling you and saying get into this Merrill Lynch special fund, look at the fees and I can almost guarantee you the S&P you'd be better off in a low cost index fund.
And you want to lean into your strengths. What are your strengths when you're young? You have time. And if you just save a little bit of money when you're young it adds up to a lot and you want to diversify and this is where I screwed up. I went all in on one or two things and then when they didn't work, I was just devastated, not only financially, but also just mentally. It's bad for your mental health.
Diversification. The number one question I get right now via email, is it too late to invest in NVIDIA? And what I say is, I don't know. I don't know. I can see it doubling from here. AI, great company, Jensen's a genius, I don't know. I could also see it going down 80%. It's insanely overvalued by most traditional metrics, so this is what you do, or my best advice. You buy SPY, and 33 cents on the dollar that you invest will go into the Magnificent Seven, so if they continue to rock it, you're gonna get some upside. If the other 493 stocks in the S&P have their day finally, you'll participate there, because 67 cents on your dollar will go there. The S&P is up 11 percent a year since 2008.
You think, well, that's not fun. Well, guess what? 11 percent a year means every 21 years, You're getting eight times your money back.
And what young people don't understand, and this is the final thing after diversification, stoicism, and finding your talent, is to try and recognize a flaw in our species is our inability to calibrate time. And that is recognizing the next 20 or 30 years are going to go really fast. You may not think that now, because for the majority of our time on this planet, we didn't live past 35. So a 25 year old has trouble believing they're ever going to be 55. But you will be. There's a 98.8 percent chance you're gonna make it to 55.
You are gonna be, I mean, Jesus Christ, Dan, you and me were with my sister in DC and you were an intern. What was that, 35 years ago?
DS: Yeah, yeah, the 90s, early 90s.
SG: Okay, how fast has it got?
DS: Uh, trust me, I think about this all the time. It's unbelievable.
SG: It's just like, it's a blink! But if you recognize that, it's a superpower. Because what you might think is, okay, I'm gonna max out those matching things that are really boring and lame at work. I'm gonna match out my 401K and my Roth. I'm gonna figure out a way to put a thousand or two thousand bucks in an index fund. Because in 30 years, It could be worth hundreds of thousands.
And this is where I really screwed up. I assumed I'm a baller, I'm really good at what I do, at some point I'll sell my company for tens if not hundreds of millions, I get access to great investments, I'm gonna, something's gonna hit big - and I never did the little discipline stuff every day of just saving a little bit of money. And it almost cost me immensely, because I woke up at certain points later in life, and I didn't have almost anything.
So recognizing a flaw in the species are inability to articulate time, diversifying, trying to spend less than you make, and also, at a very early age, find your talent, find what you're really good at. And if you can master it, distinct of how romantic or sexy the industry is, it is sexy to be really good at something and make a lot of money. People will find you really interesting.
DS: Okay, I want to ask you, because the book, you dedicated the book to your sons. I have sons that are, as you know, that are around the same age. One of the most annoying things I find when I try to impart pearls of wisdom, what I think are pearls of wisdom to my sons, is they are seeing all over social media, these incredibly romanticized stories of inspiration, where they see these little videos about some amazing tennis player, my kids aspire to be professional tennis players, or some amazing whatever, and you know, focus on your dream, stick to your… You can be the best, you know, I mean, these cliches, they're like cringe inducing cliches.
And the word you use here is I hear you. I wrote this down. “Outliers make for great inspiration, but they're lousy role models.” And that's what it is. My kids are fixated on the outliers. And when I tell them, it's great to have a passion. You love playing tennis. You love playing music. You love to… But the odds that you're going to be able to make a career out of this, it's preposterous.
And then I sound like such a buzzkill, because here my kids are all full of hope and the future and, you know, motivation and drive. And I'm telling them what they're doing is, well, most likely, 99.9%, not going to be their profession, and putting all their chips on that is just insanity. And you write in your book, The Path to Economic Security, the speed: slow. The path to doing it is doing it slowly. How do you tell a teenager that, you know?
SG: Yeah. And the answer is you can’t, especially you, especially your own teenagers. It has to be other people. It's what I found, but look, you know, it's must watch.
DS: Meaning cause they'll never listen to us? They have to hear it from someone else?
SG: Young men at about 14 or 15 have a healthy instinct where they don't trust anything their dad says. They admire their dad, they come back, they actually trust what other dads and their friends say more. So it's very difficult for us to give our… I mean, I'm bragging. I get young men all over the world seeking my counsel and parents, except for my kids. My kids don't believe anything I say, and are inclined to do the opposite. But a very tactical recommendation, must viewing for you and your kids, is The Basketball Diaries. And it's these two kids, these two black kids in an urban center, amazing, like God-like athletic skills, best in their high school, going to college. Don't get anywhere near the pros. Don't ever get to dollar one.
And, and sports is an amazing way to connect grit and effort. I, love team sports. I at one point thought, well, maybe I could do something in sports. And then unfortunately for me, I got to UCLA and found out pretty quickly that I was a very mediocre athlete, relative to people who are real athletes.
Look, I think they got to learn that on their own. What I would say to people pursuing a passion project, I don't want to crush their dreams, but be realistic. If you want to be in fashion, you should know you just got to ring fence it. By the time I'm 25, I want to be making enough money to support myself. So I don't need help from my parents and have my own line, whatever it is.
Put hard metrics on it, ring fence it, and then say, okay, if I don't get there, I'm going to do something else. You know, if someone is super committed to something and it's their dream, fine. But just have a sober conversation and ring fence the amount of time and energy you're going to put into it. And because you can be, you can have a really nice life being in the top half.
We got five people leaving the trades industry and only two going in over the next 20 years. If you enjoy working outdoors, and you're handy, like, installation of energy efficient HVAC, there's someone in your neighborhood who is selling a company, a baby boomer, that you could buy for no money down, and just pay them a licensing fee, and then buy another one. The millionaire next door is a guy doing boring shit. Or a woman doing boring shit who is hardworking and a good person who spots opportunities and is not, you know, quite frankly, and is, then, races cars on the weekends with his buddies where he pays someone a lot of money to take him to some great track somewhere and race cars.
I get to do the most amazing, like dumb things of my hobbies. And I pay someone else to give me access, pursuing those professions. You can't crush your kid's dreams. If they dream of playing tennis or whatever, what type of sport do your kids and do?
DS: Tennis, they're both obsessive with tennis. But, and by the way, I will say, they get up at 530 in the morning, most mornings, on their own, I don't wake them up. They play from 6 to 7 in the morning, then they usually do another two hours in the evenings, and they play tournaments on the weekends. They have drive. They are, I mean, they're, by the way, in all that time, Scott, per earlier conversation, they're not sitting on their phones. They're actually training and practicing and playing. So, that's good stuff, right? That's good ingredients.
SG: It's a net positive. They're gonna get grit, camaraderie, great shape. Be outside. You just do the math with them, right? Jeff Cliparda was the God tennis player at UCLA. I doubt he ever made a hundred thousand bucks. And he was like, he was number one at UCLA and all our fraternity brothers used to go down and watch Jeff play. You just gotta, at their age, yeah, go for it. That kind of athletic skill and training and I rode crew in college. It taught me how to push beyond any sort of limits that I thought I had. It was incredibly beneficial for me. Fortunately, there's no aspiration or dream of making money in rowing, but I think sports are a wonderful thing for a kid. I would bet, you know, with good parenting, they're going to figure it out pretty quickly. And not only that, they'll get it. They'll probably get into great - I am not worried about your sons.
DS: All right. Last question on the book. You say, don't day trade. I know a lot of young people today more than I've ever seen before are into the gamification of trading. And because of the data that they have available, a number of these trading sites make available, they convince themselves that they're actually doing deep research. And they are doing analytical work on their investments and they can show you the data and they can show you the returns and they can show you that if they're doing it on Robin Hood or they're doing it on, you know, FanDuel, if they're betting on sports. They show you all this data and look at all this work and I'm doing all this research and I see this with young people all over the place.
You say in the book, nonsense.
SG: Just be cognizant of the fact that the smartest people in the world with godlike technology are trying to tap into a flaw in the species and that is, when we came out of the Savannah, there was a lack of food. It was a lack of sugary salty and fatty food. There was a lack of mating opportunities, a lack of free play. Men are much more risk aggressive.
And so, with a lack of regulation, these very talented well resourced companies want to convince you that everyone's making money trading doja coin. But you that you have the skills to bet on the kansas city chiefs on fan duel that you have the ability to pick the next big crypto stock or the next NVIDIA.
And someone you know will, and they'll take a screenshot. Assume you are not that person. 80 to 95 percent of people who day trade lose money. If you pick a stock on any given day, it has like a 50% percent chance of going up. If you had picked any five S&P stocks, any five, and held them for 10 years, no one has ever lost money.
And if you want to take 30 percent of your money and play crypto or bet on the Kansas City Chiefs or buy individual stocks, have at it, you're going to learn life lessons are important. It's a little bit of fun, some consumption. I love to gamble. I love to gamble. I take 10,000 bucks. I go down to the casino. I lose it all. They pay for my room and I feel like I'm a baller and that's a 10,000 room and they bring me free drinks. I wear a kilt. It's consumption for me. I finally have the money where I can do that. But I'm not pretending that I'm good at it. I'm not pretending that trading stocks I have some insight and that if I'm on the right board on Reddit I'm gonna make money.
It's gambling. It's a dopa hit. And that's fine. We all need dopa. Knock yourself out.
But here's the thing. I can look any kid in the eye and go, I know how to get you rich. That's the good news. I know how to get you economically secure. The bad news is the answer is slowly. And anyone trying to convince you that you can find the perfect mate on Tinder, that if you just eat this stuff you're going to get ripped fast, if you just trade using TradeLikeChuck or some strategy, or you listen to smart people on Reddit and you trade stocks on Robinhood… it is a path to disappointment, to less money than you'd have otherwise, and also incredible mental and emotional hits.
Find something you're good at, outsource it, low cost index funds, and then take all of that time you were spending checking your phones for where Bitcoin is or where stocks are, and reallocate that and double down into your job. I hate side hustles. If you are doing too many side hustles, you're in the wrong main hustle. Find something you're good at, you could be great at and double down on that thing. And then spend less than you make, put a little bit of money away every week, every month in diversified funds. And then in an instant, you're going to be Dan and Scott's age and you're going to have financial security, which is amazing.
It is so much fun to take care of your kids. It is so much fun to go to Tel Aviv and stay at the Norman. It is so much fun. I don't play tennis, but you know what I do? I get to meet them, because I go to fucking Wimbledon, because I have a lot of money. And you know what? That's better. It's better. I'd rather be me than the number 8th ranked tennis player in the world.
I'd rather be Roger Federer than me. I'd rather be Nadal than me. But below 4 or 5, I'd rather be me. Making money in a boring, lame industry that gave me access to those people - because I invested, I had discipline, and I had patience. And that's the vision I want to outline for young people. Is that you are never going to be more passionate about anything than having experiences with your kids and the lack of economic anxieties that you can focus on those relationships.
That beats everything. That beats everything. You want to be a chef? Great, I get it. You know what's even more awesome than that? Being able to take care of your parents. That is, when your parents get sick, and they will, your ability to step in and not only provide care and love, but also provide economic support.
In America, you know, I couldn't take care of my mom when I was younger, when she first got sick. It was emasculating. It was humiliating. America is mean to poor people. That's the bottom line. I think it's awful. I don't think it's fair. It is. It is. And recognizing those realities in terms of your own mental well being, the things you're going to be passionate about as a grown man.
You know, I think a lot about masculinity and what it means to be a provider and a protector. You know, I think this stuff is really important. And there's some basics, not easy, but some basics where you can get there. So again, I know how to get you rich. That's the good news. The bad news is the answer is slowly.
DS: I'll say Scott, just to bring this conversation full circle, the other plus that it brings you is what you talked about earlier. The confidence and the security to speak out even when it's not popular and not cool about things you care about, which you have been doing. And I have been grateful for, I got to say my, my friend, John Podhoretz, who's been on this podcast a bunch of times, wrote this essay for Commentary Magazine called They're Coming After Us, which he, described the 20 years that kind of led to October 7th in the United States and in the West and how October 7th just catalyzed this moment where they're coming after us. And the next essay, the part two of that, was effectively what he was saying is, where this is going, is they're trying to drive us underground. It's what you were describing earlier in the conversation, that they just want to make being Jewish, being publicly Jewish, so uncomfortable and so unpleasant. And with so much friction that people just say, you know what, young people, young Jews just say, what do I need this for? I just want to lead a normal life, a normal assimilated life. I want to keep my head down. I'm not going to identify publicly with the community. I'm just going to mind my own business. And the people you were talking about earlier, people in business and other people of influence who are Jewish, who just choose to just kind of lay low - and you haven't been laying low. And, I know you've taken some hits for it, I'm sorry for that, but I'm grateful that it hasn't intimidated you, it hasn't quieted you, so, um, as we say in the English translation of a great Jewish piece of wisdom is from strength to strength. I wish you strength to strength.
SG: Well, I appreciate it and I reciprocate your sentiments Dan. You know, you and I reconnected after 30 years and I called my sister which is how I met you and I said, Dan has been like a real leader on this issue. He's like unafraid and he's out there. So right back at you brother.
DS: Thank you, Scott. Stay safe, and I'll see you soon.
SG: Sounds good. Dan. Thanks for your time.
DS: That's our show for today. To keep up with Scott Galloway, you can listen to his podcast and subscribe - that's Prof G is one podcast. The other one is Pivot. You can find those wherever you get your podcasts. You should order his new book called The Algebra of Wealth, and of course you can subscribe to his newsletter, his weekly newsletter, and you can do that at profgmedia.com.
Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.