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Phil Meets Prof G: Rage, Reform, and Reclaiming America
140 Plays5 days ago
What happens when America’s bluntest business voice meets its sharpest industry analyst?
In this unfiltered and high-voltage conversation, HFS CEO Phil Fersht sits down with NYU Professor, best-selling author, and media provocateur Scott Galloway (aka Prof G). Together, they pull no punches unpacking the anxiety and opportunity in today’s America—from broken capitalism and boomer-fueled burnout to the tech monopolies shaping our mental health and democracy.
Scott dishes out straight talk on generational rage, the illusion of innovation, and why young Americans are rightly pissed. But he’s not all gloom—he’s got a battle plan to rebuild the country through real reform, national service, and making masculinity cool again.
This one isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s for those who want to understand where America is heading—and how to help steer it.
What You’ll Hear in 30 Minutes
- Why young people feel cheated—and what’s fueling their disillusionment
- Scott’s take on Big Tech’s grip on democracy and mental health
- Why national service and shared sacrifice might save the country
- How business leaders must adapt to a broken trust economy
- Phil and Scott’s honest dialogue on capitalism, masculinity, and what comes next
Guest Snapshots
Scott Galloway, also known as Prof G, is a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, serial entrepreneur, best-selling author, podcast host, and fierce advocate for economic reform. Known for his razor-sharp commentary on tech, business, and society, he’s built a loyal following of professionals seeking unfiltered insight and big-picture truth. He’s the author of Adrift, The Four, and The Algebra of Happiness, and regularly challenges the status quo across media and academia.
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro and Welcome
01:15 – Why young Americans are mad (and should be)
03:40 – The rise of rage in Gen Z and millennials
07:20 – Tech’s failure to fix what matters
10:35 – Why the American Dream feels dead (and how to revive it)
13:50 – National service, masculinity, and purpose
17:15 – Can capitalism be reformed or is it broken?
20:05 – What the US election might mean for the future
23:10 – The Boomer problem and building generational empathy
26:30 – Realistic hope: what we can do next
Explore More
- Scott Galloway on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/profgalloway/
- The Prof G Pod: https://profgmedia.com/podcast/
- The Prof G Website: https://profgmedia.com/
- Phil Fersht on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philfersht/
- More from HFS Research: https://www.hfsresearch.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast
00:00:12
Speaker
You're listening to From the Horse's Mouth, intrepid conversations with Phil First. Ready to meet the disruptors who are guiding us to the new great utopia by reshaping our world and pushing past corporate spin for honest conversations about the future impact of current and emerging technologies?
00:00:30
Speaker
Tune in now. So I'd like to start with, you've mentioned America, Scott, as a brand in decline.
America's Brand and Economic Disparities
00:00:40
Speaker
What economic and political signals should leaders be watching most closely for in this environment?
00:00:47
Speaker
I think the majority of our problems can be reverse engineered to one, a couple scary stats. The first is for the first time in the history of America, the first time in 275 years, 30 year old is not doing as well as his or her parents were at 30.
00:01:00
Speaker
That creates tremendous rage and shame. I mean, for anyone who has kids, you have your world of work, you have your world of friends. If somebody comes off the track with one of your kids, your whole world strings to that kid.
00:01:13
Speaker
And when you have a 30-year-old at home or a 25-year-old who just isn't living up to the expectations his parents, he himself, or society has built for him, it brings the whole house down.
00:01:25
Speaker
but By the way, these aren't the incumbents will claim that it's they'll use terms like network effects and globalization bullshit. We have as a society in the U.S. s have decided to make a concerted effort through economic policy to transfer wealth from young to old people.
00:01:37
Speaker
People under the age of 40 are 24% less wealthy. People over the age of 70 are 72% wealthier. The child tax credit, which would have cost $40 billion dollars so and would benefited young families, get stripped out of the infrastructure bill. The $120 billion cost of living adjustment and Social Security flies right through Congress. Old people in America have figured out a way to vote themselves more money, and the average age of Congress is 62. Two-thirds of them will be dead in 25 years. Are they really that worried about the deficit or climate change?
00:02:05
Speaker
In sum, The primary metric here is how well young people are doing and they're not doing well. So things like self-harm indexes, things like obesity indices, the number of people having children. 40 years ago, 60% of 30-year-olds had at least one child in the house. Now it's 27.
00:02:22
Speaker
In sum, we have decided to take our kid's credit card and keep running it so you and me can have ketamine and cocaine and champagne in the club.
Arati: India's New Chat App
00:02:30
Speaker
So shifting gears, have you heard of a an app called Arati, Scott?
00:02:35
Speaker
I don't think I have. Yeah, it's it means chatter in Tamil. And Zoho, which is the Indian software company, launched this to compete with WhatsApp a few months ago.
00:02:47
Speaker
And it's recently received 7 million downloads in seven weeks. You've got a whole swathe of folks in India who are trying to get off WhatsApp because they don't want to they don't want to use a system that's centered in the U.S. to use something that's centered in India.
America's Global Relationships
00:03:06
Speaker
What do you think of that? As awesome as America is, it's 5% of the population and 25% of the world's GDP. I'm not a humble person person. I'm a fucking monster. I'm ridiculously hardworking and talented.
00:03:19
Speaker
But the smartest thing I ever did was being born in America, where I had access to free education, UCLA and Berkeley. came of age during the internet when American middle-class households funded research that resulted in a post-nuclear communications technology called the internet.
00:03:36
Speaker
My mom had access to family planning, which would have made us destitute. I had access to assisted lunch. And I came of age in an era of the Internet and rule of law and inbound capital such that I could raise hundreds of millions of dollars for my crazy startups.
00:03:54
Speaker
So all of those things, and by the way, immigrants built the majority of my companies, and then I joined the faculty of NYU. Everything that has given me an extraordinary life is under attack attack right now. And all of my companies are global. And when I walked into Samsung or LVMH, they made fun of Americans, but they liked us. They thought we were the good guys.
00:04:13
Speaker
And that's no longer the case. Would you want to work with America right now? We have taken the two biggest, account the biggest acon consumer economy in the world is about to be India. We have fantastic connective relationships with them through our academic institutions. 20% of the NASDAQ by market capitalization is not run by immigrants. It's run by Indian immigrants. And we have this sclerotic economic warfare policy where they say, fuck it. I'm just going to go hang out with Xi and Putin.
00:04:40
Speaker
So the tariff nonsense that was supposed to inspire all this incredible dealmaking has done that. Unfortunately, the dealmaking is taking place without us. The soybean farmers in the United States, China has just basically wrecked that entire sector and economy by saying, you know what, fine, we're not buying from you.
Impact of Nationalism on Alliances
00:04:58
Speaker
They've established new relationships with the Brazilian and Argentinian suppliers.
00:05:02
Speaker
Those relationships are not coming back. We're kicking out, we're discouraging in my industry international students from applying. I mean, these kids come in and spend three, four, $500,000 on tuition and Chipotle and rent at some of the most incredible margins.
00:05:19
Speaker
And we've said, don't come here. When we import a Mercedes for $100,000, 10% operating margin. That's trading at a multiple of eight. They get in shareholder value. When we export an NVIDIA GPU hopper at points of operating margin times of one point six five million dollars in shareholder value global trade has been disproportionately advantageous to Americans and American shareholders. And yet we believe this bullshit that somehow we're victims of international trade and start lashing out at Canada.
00:06:00
Speaker
We lash out at Canada, right? I love the question that Warren Buffett posed to a friend of his who's a Holocaust survivor. He said, how do you know if you have a true friend? And she said, I think I asked myself one question, would they hide me?
00:06:17
Speaker
You know what Canada did? Canada hit us. 1979, Iranian hostage crisis. The embassy hid six Americans and stayed behind after getting them out safely. And we declare economic warfare on Canada?
00:06:30
Speaker
In sum, Brexit, the invasion of Iraq are nothing in terms of own goals to this ridiculous nationalist weirdo fascist ideology that the enemy is within and somehow we're victims and turning our back on the greatest alliances in history, and that's the alliances between us and other democracies.
Young Men's Struggles and Political Shifts
00:06:52
Speaker
We are literally snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Biggest own goal in history, all this nonsense around tariffs. And instead of sending troops into Ukraine or having a global peacekeeping force in Gaza, we're sending troops into fucking Portland.
00:07:07
Speaker
Here's an idea. Let's get our heads out of our asses. um A huge amount of disagreement here, Scott. So is Trump a one-off? What comes next? You know, I don't know. I think I'm better than your average bear at predicting economic trends and market trends.
00:07:21
Speaker
I would not have predicted this. I think a lot about, i think in order to address the problem, you have to diagnose it And granted, I think a lot about the struggles of young men. So everything, I'm a hammer and everything I see is a nail. But if you look at why we elected trump i think it all reverse engineers to that stat i talked about 30 year olds not doing as well specifically young men aren't doing well so young men are four times more likely to kill themselves. If you go into a morgue and there's five people died by suicide, four of them are men.
00:07:53
Speaker
Single women own more homes than single men now. And by the way, we should do nothing to get in the way the progress of women. I think that's a wonderful thing. But we don't have a homeless or an opiate problem in the US. We have a male opiate and a male homeless problem. Three out of four addicts, three out of four homeless are men.
00:08:06
Speaker
And to the rights credit, they recognized the problem earlier. and said there's a problem with our young men. And they kind of, Trump flew into the manosphere, Rogan, rockets, crypto.
00:08:18
Speaker
If you look at the groups that pivoted hardest from red to blue from 2020 to 2024, there were three demographic groups. Latinos who don't want to be identified as one group. Mexican-Americans in Southern California are much different than Cuban-Americans in Florida.
00:08:32
Speaker
People under the age of 30, who are just economically focused and said, I'm not doing well, so I just want change. And you telling me, you show me a bunch of stats saying things aren't that bad isn't helping when I can't afford my rent or can't afford my student loans.
00:08:45
Speaker
And then the most interesting thing is the third group that pivoted hardest from blue to red was 45 to 64 year old women. And my thesis is that that's their mothers. Because if your son is in the basement playing video games and vaping,
00:08:59
Speaker
You don't care about territorial sovereignty in Ukraine or transgender rights. You just want change and chaos. And there's still a lot of women in the United States who will vote for who they perceive as being in the best interest of their husbands and their sons.
00:09:10
Speaker
So I think if we want to go back to an era that embraces our alliances, has greater fidelity for our institutions, the Constitution, kind of bear hugs again democracy.
Improving Prospects for Youth
00:09:21
Speaker
i think a lot of it comes back to lifting up young people and giving young people a greater sense of patriotism, some solutions. I think we should have mandatory national service. I think young people need to see how wonderful Americans are. The worst thing about AI is that it's crawling the online world, which sucks.
00:09:38
Speaker
When you meet people in person, you guys are going to take a coffee break. You're going to meet people from different sexual orientations, different regions, different income levels, different political leanings. And you're going to find out almost all of them are lovely.
00:09:50
Speaker
And unfortunately, online is teaching us to that to think that our neighbor is the enemy. And so I think mandatory national service, I think 8 million homes in 10 years, manufactured homes, which are 50% less expensive than homes built on site, $25 an hour minimum wage, universal child tax credit, tax credits for third places so kids can meet more, fall in love.
00:10:14
Speaker
I think we need to massively level up young people such that they feel better about America, they feel better about themselves. They want to engage in relationships. They want to have more sex. They want to have kids. I think that the metrics we should be focused on are how well our youth is doing and how we go back to being mammals, not economic agents or nutrition for big tech.
CEOs and Political Engagement
00:10:38
Speaker
um Thank you for that. So one thing that's come up a lot for me with our clients is what advice do you have for CEOs in particular weighing if and how to speak out on political issues, especially when doing so might alienate a segment of their stakeholders?
00:10:58
Speaker
Look, as a progressive, I want to say, be a leader, stand up. But the reality is on the majority of boards I'm on, I'm like, don't stay out of it.
00:11:09
Speaker
I think for-profit companies are there to create profits, not to be social engineers or the orthodoxy of a certain political viewpoint. And i think in certain instances, you have no choice and you have to take a stand.
00:11:25
Speaker
And I applaud it when companies do that. And we're getting to a point now where when a company is asked to bend the knee, I would argue the CEO has an obligation to think about stakeholders and not just shareholder value and perhaps you know say no, which no one has so far.
00:11:41
Speaker
But on the whole, I can just tell you when I'm on boards, I discourage the CEO from saying anything political. like At the end of the day, we're here to create, to turn inputs into greater outputs and provide economic security for our employees, our shareholders, and their families. And I find a lot of the political Rhetoric, especially over the last 10 years, was mostly virtue signaling, was mostly trying to appeal to a younger employee base that they perceived as being more progressive.
00:12:10
Speaker
But the music didn't match the words in terms of how they were actually supporting their female employees or economic policies or policies they were embracing. So I think it's okay to just come out of the closet and say, this is a for-profit entity. We're here for shareholder value. We're going to be good citizens.
00:12:27
Speaker
We're going to be good to our employees because that's smart for shareholder value. But at the end of the day, we're here to create profits. And then it's up to us to elect really smart people who will tax these companies and figure out what to do with that capital.
00:12:39
Speaker
But I think it's dangerous waters to wade into politics because immediately you're going to alienate 50% of America and 50, not 50%, but maybe 30 or 40% of your employees. So 80%, 90% of time,
00:12:51
Speaker
eighty percent ninety percent of the time It's just a bad idea on a risk-adjusted basis. It's just oftentimes the CO virtue signaling or imposing his or her viewpoint on the rest of the employee base who feels a need to agree with that person because that person has so much control over their economic
AI's Future in Business
00:13:07
Speaker
livelihood. And some, on a risk-adjusted basis, it's almost always a bad idea.
00:13:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's good advice. So, final question. When are we going to stop talking about ai I think ah AI will be a little bit like electricity, and that is we're going to talk about for a while, but then it's just going to be something that's so ubiquitous.
00:13:26
Speaker
I think we're going to talk about it more because I'm now believing that we're probably going to see a pop in the AI bubble, and it's going to dominate the headlines. So when are we going to... Let's hope we're talking about it for a while because if we're not talking about it, it probably means something ugly has pushed it out.
00:13:43
Speaker
I think for the next two, three years, it's going to be the premier business story because the numbers are just, ah there's one or two business stories that will dominate the headlines in business. Either AI continues to just garner extraordinary shareholder valuation increases, or it's popped and that'll dominate the headlines for a while. So I don't know, I would say in two to three years, maybe if I had to guess when we kind of move on to another business story. Yeah.
00:14:10
Speaker
Well, this has been a tremendous hour. i think you've got a very engrossed audience here, Scott, who I know you can't see them, but I think everyone here has really enjoyed this. Very informative, thank you.
00:14:21
Speaker
Thank you.
00:14:26
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to From the Horse's Mouth, intrepid conversations with Phil First. Remember to follow Phil on LinkedIn and subscribe and like on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite platform for no-nonsense takes on the intricate dance between technology, business, and ideological systems.
00:14:45
Speaker
Got something to add to the discussion? Let's have it. Drop us a line at fromthehorsesmouth at hfsresearch.com or connect with Phil on LinkedIn.