December 10, 2019 • 24 mins
Earlier this season, Stephanie spoke with her friend Scott Galloway—an entrepreneur, author, and professor—about the #MeToo movement and moral leadership. Their fast-paced, wide-ranging conversation also covered income inequality, parenting, white male privilege, and a lot more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to Modern Rules, a production of MSNBC and
I Heart Radio. I'm Stephanie Rule, MSNBC anchor and NBC
News correspondent, and this is a special bonus episode of
Modern Rules. Yea, I had a couple of conversations this
(00:24):
season that you didn't get to hear all of. But
those conversations stuck with me. They sat with me over
the last few weeks and months, so much so that
I wanted to share more. Earlier this season, I spoke
with a good friend of mine, entrepreneur, author, business and
marketing professor, and the very outspoken Scott Galloway. We talked
(00:45):
a lot about the Me Too movement and moral leadership,
but we covered a lot more. In our full conversation.
We covered everything from taxes, income inequality, parenting, mean girls,
and something Scott Franklin knows all about white male privilege.
It was a long game of mental and verbal ping pong,
a game that Scott was definitely not prepared for. In hindsight,
(01:06):
he said, if I knew were going to cover all this,
I probably wouldn't have shown up. But guess what he did.
And I'd like to say it was one of the
most fun and lightning conversations I had this season, and
for this bonus episode, I just wanted to share a
whole lot more. One of the reasons I decided to
go in academia is academia is based on the pursuit
of truth, regardless of who it offends. That you had
(01:28):
Socrates saying our job is to provoke. So in order
to provoke, we actually need to find land outside the
city where people have freedom of thought and they're protected.
If they say the world is around, they're not burnt
at the stay. We are in this cancel culture. Social
media is performance art. You can't have a nuanced conversation forever.
The problem is, I think we have this culture now
(01:48):
where you get points. If you're offended, you're immediately right.
All you have to do to be right is be offended.
You immediately get virtue points. So this triggers microaggressions kids
who have parents who provide concierge and bulldozer parenting, creating
this princess in the peace syndrome among kids. I see
coming into college has led to an environment, especially at universities,
(02:09):
where we're really not encouraged to provoke. We're encouraged to
pursue ideas and train people to make a lot of money.
But we're not there to explore ideas because as a white,
heterosexual male, I walk into the room slightly wrong ish
wherever I am at all times, and people say, well,
we're having a conversation around these things. No we're not.
We're not really having a conversation. We're having an overdue
immune reaction to some terrible problems. But to that point,
(02:32):
if you say something from your heart and your mind
and it doesn't exactly fit into a category, people will
call you a sexist, a racist, a misogynist, and then
you're dead to them. That's my point that there's only
one real dialogue here, and that is an appropriate dialogue
for someone in my position, and that is to pile
on and be outraged by everything and join the chorus.
(02:55):
It's nothing. This is my fear retreat. Look at me too.
For example, I did a wellness panel last year and
I was talking about how in me too, there's different
grades of me too, and I actually brought up a
very unpopular topic of redemption because I think, listen, we
love to fight as a culture, but we also love forgiveness.
(03:17):
We love a comeback, and I brought that up, and
a woman in the audience stood up and said, f you,
and she walked out. And another woman said, corporate America
was built by male white supremacists, and until we destroy
that system, we can't move forward. And I try to
make the argument, like, listen, the world is run by
white guys. If you want to get them to the table,
if you want to make things better, we have to
(03:38):
find a middle ground. Is there a middle ground? Or
do you have to burn the house down? Because is
it easy for me, somebody who has white privilege to say,
come on, now, can't we love more? Can't we just
get along? Because I'm not really oppressed and I never
have been. So that's a difficult question. I think we're
going to happen over correction. I don't know if we're
gonna have what is really a conversation. I didn't how
(04:00):
we end up on the other end of this. So
I was thinking about Joe Biden, and I believe what
Jonathan Height, and he's sort of my Yoda around this stuff,
and he's a colleague at n y O, and he
believes that, at least initially, you should interpret gestures with
the intent that they were made, and I look at
what happened with Vice President Biden, and I wonder, Okay,
did that really warrant the type of response in the controversy,
(04:22):
and even just saying that is dangerous because there's a
general viewpoint that okay, anything, any of expression of affection
in the workplace is a really interesting thing. Because I
do a podcast with Kara Swisher and she was saying
that she's experienced, and I believe her so many just
creepy moments with men who feel at liberty to invade
a woman's space, and I believe that and I've seen it.
(04:44):
I also asked her, have there been moments of expression
of affection at work that you've appreciated, and she said yes,
And I said, well, some of us need help figuring
out the gray zone in between that and the reaction
right now among all men at work is that there's
absolutely no affection. There's no real open, honest style logged.
There isn't even joking, and I think it's creating a
lack of camaraderie and quite frankly, a lack of career
(05:05):
advancement in connection for the people who needed the most.
I was in sales and banking. One could say, oh
my god, it's sexist that you had to make dinner reservations.
What were you doing going to places like that? Guess what?
Me going to those dinners and getting myself a seat
every single night was great for my career. And to
say I'm going to use my feminine wiles. It's not
(05:26):
feminine wiles or sexuality, but women do have high emotional
intelligence and people might invite me to dinner because I'm
gonna make the table move faster. I'm gonna make the
clients feel good, not in a sexual way, but in
a personal way. And that personal connection, building trust with
the senior people at the bank and with our clients
is what catapulted my business. You know how this problem
(05:49):
gets solved, and this is going to sound politically correct.
You're generous with people. And the thing that is protected
or been the kind of the kryptonite of my firms
from ever having a complaint or a lawsuit is that
early on and I recognize this underinvested asset called young
female leadership, and that is if you gave him a
little bit of flexibility. They were outstanding assets that weren't
appreciated by traditional corporate America. So at L two, which
(06:12):
we sold two years ago, nine of the eleven largest
equity holders were either LGBT or women. And you know what,
when you have women and LGBT people running the company,
this just never happens. And there was this kind of
underinvested asset. And now finally sevent of high school val
electorians or women, they're finally catching up in the workplace.
We have a different crisis of the making, though, and
(06:34):
that is young men are failing. And I see it
in my organization. The women are thriving. The young women
are thriving. Where women hit a hit a wall. And
this is where the nuance comes in is when women
have kids. So women without kids have closed the wage gap.
Women with kids immediately dropped to seventy seven cents on
the dollar. But Scott, corporate America, even government was designed
(06:54):
in a way under the assumption that corporate leader does
their job and there is a separate person in their
home that manages their children and their household. That's how
the model was created. I remember before I had my
first child, thinking I'm going to run the securities division
a Deutsche Bank. I remember the day I came back
from eternity leave, looking across at the head of the
(07:16):
securities division and thinking for a moment, Holy cow, that
guy is on the road forty weeks a year. And
at that moment, I thought, well, maybe I'll just be
the biggest producer. And unless we start to look at
what people's priorities are men and women, I don't think
you're going to change that for women. Look, evolution and
biology is pretty powerful, and no matter how politically correct,
(07:36):
we are the contribution that men want to make in
the home. I do think that women's instant. You know,
when our kids get up at night, my wife, here's
the footsteps. She's just trained to that noise. And while
I'd like to think I contribute, I'm not sure. My
wife worked at Goldman Sacks for five years and yet
we found that the majority of the time she was
the one getting up And I'm not proud of that,
(07:58):
But it's a how do we rate or compensate for
that type of balance? And I think corporate America is
trying to slowly but surely increased maternity leave. One thing
I noticed about Goldman was they tried to be pretty
empathetic to women with children, or at least they played
FaceTime about it, but at the end of the day,
she couldn't on a moment's notice go to Detroit and
be with General Motors for the meeting because we had
two kids under the age of five. So I think
(08:21):
corporate America has sort of figured out what I'll call
the male female wage dynamic. What they haven't figured out
is people with ovaries. They haven't figured out how to
create career velocity for people who decide to fulfill the
most important attribute of the species, and that is propagation.
We just haven't figured it out yet. Well, it's hard
to do that because when you're in your family raising
(08:42):
childbirth years, that's when listen, a thirty one year old
investment banker, that's when he or she is in his lane, right.
I would never ever say it out loud. But when
I think back to when I was in banking and
I would interview associates that were men and women, I
would never say this out loud. I'm sure in the
back of my head I thought, well, I think she's engaged,
(09:03):
we're getting married. When she having kids, she's going to
come back right and that, And I would obviously never
say it out last time, but I know it impacted
me because, especially in those industries, you need horses to
run around the track. Imagine you're the suit of a
small company that's venture backed and you have sort of
(09:24):
a twenty four kind of haul pass to survive and
the infanmortality rate on small businesses, and you're interviewing two
HBS grads and once a guy who's totally paranoid and
worried and hungry because he has two new kids at
home and you know it's gonna work eighteen hours a day.
And one is that young woman who has just gotten married,
and you're thinking, Okay, what happens when she gets pregnant?
(09:48):
And I want to be a good guy and give
him maternity leave, and you want to do the right thing,
but unfortunately sometimes you wonder can I afford to do
the right thing. You check yourself and you stop that thinking.
But there's just no way you can control those thoughts.
But to that point when we get offended when the
president says America first, isn't America first? Kind of the
way we run our families, take care of our own
(10:09):
family first, and then in our excess capacity, give to others. Yeah,
but the wonderful thing about capitalism is it assumes that
a basic human attribute of our species is that we're
going to fix our own oxygen masks before helping others.
Self interest is the most powerful motivating force in the world,
and it's the basis of capitalism. At the end of
(10:29):
the day, the baker doesn't give the butcher bread for
that person's well being, but because they want meat in return.
It's a powerful engine. But also a key to capitalism
is this notion of democracy and the rule of fair play.
And we also believe in progressive tax structure that we
have a baseline level of redistribution of income. The game
might be tilted, but at least it's not rigged. And
I would argue over the last thirty years that the
(10:51):
middle class has figured out slowly but surely. Corporations have
become government, the tax systems become rigged. Okay, But Scott,
here's the thing. What you are asking for is moral leadership.
I think we are the avengers of the galaxy. We
are the superheroes. American Disabilities Act, the Civil Rights Act,
that there's been, Social Security, all these things were hugely expensive,
(11:14):
hugely unpopular, and we did them. I think there's been thousands,
if not millions, of people who have shown incredible moral
leadership been class traders. Whether it's Teddy Roosevelt saying to
the railroad guys, you elected me, I love you, but
guess what I'm breaking you up, whether it was FDR
being a class trader to his rich friends by increasing
taxes so he could have more social welfare so people
(11:36):
didn't die in poverty. Traditionally throughout history, it's very clear
when we get to the current levels of income inequality
that we have. The good news is they always self correct.
Income inequality self correct. That's the bad news. The mechanisms
of self correction are either war, famine, or revolution, and
that is people get so fed up they turned to
(11:57):
nationalism and they start demonizing immigrants, or they turn to
some sort of government overthrow through socialism. We end up
with jobs. At some point, when you look out your
window and you see everyone with pitchforks, you realize, well,
maybe it's time, you know, maybe it should be more
than let them et kick. I think we're at that point.
The last time we had these levels of income inequality
was in the twenties, right before the crash, and people
(12:17):
are so fed up an economy and a society can't
survive without a prospering middle class, and the middle class
in America has either been sideways most general to sleep
for the last thirty years, probably going down. And we're
in the midst of a soft revolution and a manifest
itself in different ways. Hold on a second, because we
have so much more to talk about. We'll be right
back after a quick rate. Welcome back to modern rules.
(12:43):
There's calls for seventy taxes and the elimination of air
transport and a billionaire super tax. There's calls to put
Lori Laughlin not Aunt Becky in prison. I empathize with her.
I'm an academic, and I do think it's probably easy
to incrementally decided to make bad decisions around getting your
kids into school, because as an academic, I can tell
you we become drunk on exclusivity. We have lost the
(13:05):
script as academics. We used to think we were public servants.
Now we think we're luxury goods and minding. And my
director of admission stand up every year and brag about
how impossible it is for kids to get into school,
which creates this hunger games where if you get into
a good school, you're going to do great, and if
you don't, you're kind of, for lack of a better term,
you're screwed. Right, bad decisions. We all end up in
(13:27):
the arms race, and you say, well, I can't parent
in a vacuum. I've got to get in the mix. Right.
Maybe this was maybe was born when Princeton Review was created,
however many years ago. But it's impossible. Like I, I
do understand the slippery slope and how you become one
of those parents who bought their way into school. But
(13:48):
it is a slippery slope. But it's also impossible to
get out of the game because you do want to
do what's right for your kids. We clear out all
the physical obstacles for our children, so our kids have
never been physically safer. But the result is we've used
so many sanitary wipes on our kids lives that they
aren't developing the immunities they need. And then when they
get to college, we have record levels of depression and suicide.
(14:10):
The number of emergency room admittances of teens who are
self harming or attempted suicide has doubled in the last
thirty six months. You combine that with the fact that
these kids are now on screens more than they're on TV,
and not only do they see the party that they're
missing out on, they see it play out in real time.
You have record levels of team depression. You know what
is the biggest risk to our happiness? Stephanie? For you
(14:31):
and me, the biggest risk to our happiness is the
combination of good intentions but concierge bulldoz are parenting that
you and I are probably both a little bit guilty of,
and combination with Instagram and these weapons of mass destruction
entrenchment by mostly teenage girls. We talk about toxic masculinity.
There's something called toxic femininity playing out in high schools
(14:52):
right now, and one of our kids gets really depressed
and upset. You want our lives to be taken off track.
We are facing an emerging mental health crisis in why
won't we acknowledge this? Right? Mean girls, for example, exist.
I see it in my personal life every day. If
you look at Instagram, it's the epicenter of it. Yet
it's something we're not willing to talk about. It's too
(15:14):
offensive to talk about. Well, it goes back to this
notion that I talk about genders I think embracing your
gender is hugely rewarding. I think embracing your masculinity is
hugely rewarding. Embracing your femininity is hugely rewarding. That doesn't
mean you have to be a bad person. That doesn't
mean you have to be silly or oppressive or toxic
or embracing your lack of your gender neutrality if that
(15:36):
is what makes you happy. But right now we have
a conversation where you're not allowed to acknowledge the sexes
are different. So, for example, boys, and this is scientifically based,
bully physically and verbally. We punch each other and then
call each other names and it's upsetting, but it's usually
kind of over girls. Bully relationally it is really damaging
(15:56):
to other girls. It is actually more toxic than physically,
you know, holding someone down and hitting them or giving
them a weggie. When you start tactically, goes more thoughtful
and they're more mature. They pick a victim and they
start using these nuclear weapons of mockery and self esteem
destroying called Instagram. But in a conniving way. Why do
you think the movie Mean Girls was Why do we
(16:18):
think the book was written? I was it created out
of nowhere, right the movie Heathers existed, So we're going
to pretend that all women completely tell the truths and
we're all sisters. I have, without a doubt, had more
women stabbed me in the back, and by the way,
I've been rough on some girls too, And right now
we are unwilling to say that. First off, we have
(16:39):
to acknowledge that the sexes are different, and that's okay,
But right now you can even have a conversation that
acknowledges any differences. What we haven't in high schools, though,
I think it is really dangerous because we have kids
who aren't developing the immunities we have. So for example,
the number of teens that see their friends every day
has been cut in half in ten years. So there's
some good things. There's less team pregnancy, and there's less
(17:01):
drunk driving than ever before. But the bad news is
the reason kids aren't driving drunk or having sex is
because their home on Instagram feeling bad about themselves. So
there's a trade off here. We're going to be right
back after a quick break, welcome back to modern rules.
One of the dangers about our segregation of rich kids
(17:23):
from middle class from poor kids in the school system
is decreasing the amount of empathy we have for each other.
I went to a public school. I had friends who
are rich. I was squarely. I was part of the
upper lower middle class. And then I had friends my
One of my closest friends was a kid named Ronnie Drake,
and African American kid whose only way to college was
to get a scholarship at Lynn University in Oregon. And
I think I aspired to do more because I saw
(17:45):
my rich friends going to great universities. I think I
had more empathy for Ronnie. And the problem now is
we are separating everybody from everybody else. I think kids
have a lack of empathy. I think their parents are
clearing out all the obstacles for him and not letting
them develop immunities. And then you combine that with all
this screen time, and we have what is a brewing
mental health crisis. And it's the biggest risk. You're in
(18:06):
my happiness because you have your world of work, you
have your world of friends, you have your world of fun,
you have your world of kids. When something comes off
the rails with one of your kids, and everyone hears
on their Instagram thing, and then these guys have kids.
I can tell you're literally your world collapses. I mean,
all of a sudden, the work, the friends all goes
away when something comes off the rails with one of
your kids. But where's the balance, because in terms of
(18:26):
helicopter parenting, on one hand, you and I had no
choice but to work it out. That's my family motto
at home. But now that I know my oldest son
is dyslexic. And of course, when your kid gets diagnosed,
then you get tested and then we realize I am
but I never got diagnosed. I worked through it, and
maybe working through it, maybe working it out led to
(18:46):
my success. But I don't want my kids to struggle.
So then they get the bumpers and they and then
you're down a vortex of an osteopath and an occupational
therapist and on time testing, and then you are putting
your kid on a tiny little cloud of love and
they're just waiting to get decapitated. So how do we
(19:09):
find the right balance here? The honest answers, I don't know.
I think we're all trying to figure this stuff out.
You said something earlier or in the beginning, when you
said listen, like I know when I walk into my
classroom or a meeting. I'm already in a tough spot
because I'm the white guy. But here's why we keep
saying that. And we're saying like, the toughest place to
be is to be a white guy right now, and
(19:30):
there's a war on men. Except and listen, you and
I were on TV earlier and the seven banks cus
you know, are testifying on the hill, and somebody else
on air with us said, well, the seven white guys
walked in, So you're right, those seven white guys have
to endure people like me rolling our eyes saying, man,
seven white guys running banks. But guess what, there are
still seven white guys running banks. There are still almost
(19:53):
exclusively white guys running the planet. So to me, this
war on men, yes, we had a record. I'm of
women win in the last selection, but look at the data.
We're not taking over anything would still make less money.
That's like what Chris Rock said that if you actually
gave white men the power to change their gender and
their race, they would probably decide to just ride this
whole white guy thing out. You credit your character and
(20:15):
your hard work for your success, and then you credit
the market for your failures, and I constantly try and
virtue signal talking about the fact I was raised by
a single immigrant mother. But as a white male, you
don't realize, as white heterosexual amounts just how many small
advantages you're given every day. What I was referring to
is in the conversation around me too, or anything like this,
you have a lack of credibility, and I think there's
(20:36):
a certain assumption that you're just sort of a little
bit guilty that just by virtue of being a white
heterosexual male, you're probably one of the perpetrators on some level,
even if it's unwitting. So I agree with you, and
of instances, you know, white male privilege is still there.
I do think it's getting better, and it's getting better
for the right reasons. You know. It is a great
leveler as competition. One of the reasons the Americans beat
(20:59):
the access p hours was we brought women into the workforce,
and we kind of never turned back. When Americans wanted
to maintain their standard of living, women went into the workforce.
We no longer have the luxury of as much discrimination
as we used to because you go out of business.
So competition in America, the desire to be more competitive,
the desire to have a great firm. We no longer
(21:20):
have the luxury of saying, but Bob played lacrosse at Princeton.
It's like, well, you know what, Susie is just better
than Bob, right, so we're gonna promote Susie. And the
weird thing that's happening. What I see is there's a
lot of men in their thirties and forties in my
generation that feel that we're sort of have this birthright
to being promoted because we have outdoor plumbing, and we're white,
(21:41):
and and there's this crisis of okay, finding the realizy
you know what, that doesn't cut it anymore. It just
doesn't cut it anymore. And there's a lot of self
loathing and anger. But the reality is it's overdue, and
the great equalizer here has been competition. I think it's
a good thing. I think capitalism works. I think ultimately
our desire to win starts starching out the luxury of bigotry.
(22:03):
And I think things are headed largely in the right direction.
Other than the aberration of the last thirty months things,
I think on the whole, you know, the arc of
justice is curved, but it does bend towards justice. I
do think we're headed in the right direction. We unpacked
a lot in that conversation, but what I really took
away from Scott is that every issue we're covering today
(22:26):
that we think is monumental never before, well, guess what,
it's not new. There are years and years of nuance
and social advancement and struggle by every one of these
matters we deal with today, and perhaps the things you
are not supposed to say out loud, if you say them,
you realize that other people are thinking are dealing with
(22:47):
the same thing. Thank you for listening to today's bonus episode,
and thank you for bringing an open mind and helping
us create what are hopefully modern rules. That's it for
(23:08):
today's episode. I'm your host, Stephanie Rule. A very very
special thanks to the extraordinary people who made this happen.
My producers Julie Brown, Samantha Ullen and Anne Bark, Audio,
Michael Batt for booking and wrangling, the amazing guests who
joined us, Julian Weller for editing and bill plaques, Michael
Azar and Jacobo Penzo for their recording expertise. Special thanks
(23:30):
to Steve lick Tag, Barbara Rab, Jonathan Wald, Marie Dugo,
Holly traz Nikki Etre and Christina Everett are Executive producers
are Conald Byrne and Mangesh Hatigador, And of course, the
men who brought us all together, Chairman and CEO of
I Heart Media Bob Pittman and Chairman of NBC News
Andy Lack. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
(23:51):
the i Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows
You're listening to Modern Rules, a production of MSNBC and
I Heart Radio. I'm Stephanie Rule, MSNBC anchor and NBC
News correspondent, and this is a special bonus episode of
Modern Rules. Yea, I had a couple of conversations this
(00:24):
season that you didn't get to hear all of. But
those conversations stuck with me. They sat with me over
the last few weeks and months, so much so that
I wanted to share more. Earlier this season, I spoke
with a good friend of mine, entrepreneur, author, business and
marketing professor, and the very outspoken Scott Galloway. We talked
(00:45):
a lot about the Me Too movement and moral leadership,
but we covered a lot more. In our full conversation.
We covered everything from taxes, income inequality, parenting, mean girls,
and something Scott Franklin knows all about white male privilege.
It was a long game of mental and verbal ping pong,
a game that Scott was definitely not prepared for. In hindsight,
(01:06):
he said, if I knew were going to cover all this,
I probably wouldn't have shown up. But guess what he did.
And I'd like to say it was one of the
most fun and lightning conversations I had this season, and
for this bonus episode, I just wanted to share a
whole lot more. One of the reasons I decided to
go in academia is academia is based on the pursuit
of truth, regardless of who it offends. That you had
(01:28):
Socrates saying our job is to provoke. So in order
to provoke, we actually need to find land outside the
city where people have freedom of thought and they're protected.
If they say the world is around, they're not burnt
at the stay. We are in this cancel culture. Social
media is performance art. You can't have a nuanced conversation forever.
The problem is, I think we have this culture now
(01:48):
where you get points. If you're offended, you're immediately right.
All you have to do to be right is be offended.
You immediately get virtue points. So this triggers microaggressions kids
who have parents who provide concierge and bulldozer parenting, creating
this princess in the peace syndrome among kids. I see
coming into college has led to an environment, especially at universities,
(02:09):
where we're really not encouraged to provoke. We're encouraged to
pursue ideas and train people to make a lot of money.
But we're not there to explore ideas because as a white,
heterosexual male, I walk into the room slightly wrong ish
wherever I am at all times, and people say, well,
we're having a conversation around these things. No we're not.
We're not really having a conversation. We're having an overdue
immune reaction to some terrible problems. But to that point,
(02:32):
if you say something from your heart and your mind
and it doesn't exactly fit into a category, people will
call you a sexist, a racist, a misogynist, and then
you're dead to them. That's my point that there's only
one real dialogue here, and that is an appropriate dialogue
for someone in my position, and that is to pile
on and be outraged by everything and join the chorus.
(02:55):
It's nothing. This is my fear retreat. Look at me too.
For example, I did a wellness panel last year and
I was talking about how in me too, there's different
grades of me too, and I actually brought up a
very unpopular topic of redemption because I think, listen, we
love to fight as a culture, but we also love forgiveness.
(03:17):
We love a comeback, and I brought that up, and
a woman in the audience stood up and said, f you,
and she walked out. And another woman said, corporate America
was built by male white supremacists, and until we destroy
that system, we can't move forward. And I try to
make the argument, like, listen, the world is run by
white guys. If you want to get them to the table,
if you want to make things better, we have to
(03:38):
find a middle ground. Is there a middle ground? Or
do you have to burn the house down? Because is
it easy for me, somebody who has white privilege to say,
come on, now, can't we love more? Can't we just
get along? Because I'm not really oppressed and I never
have been. So that's a difficult question. I think we're
going to happen over correction. I don't know if we're
gonna have what is really a conversation. I didn't how
(04:00):
we end up on the other end of this. So
I was thinking about Joe Biden, and I believe what
Jonathan Height, and he's sort of my Yoda around this stuff,
and he's a colleague at n y O, and he
believes that, at least initially, you should interpret gestures with
the intent that they were made, and I look at
what happened with Vice President Biden, and I wonder, Okay,
did that really warrant the type of response in the controversy,
(04:22):
and even just saying that is dangerous because there's a
general viewpoint that okay, anything, any of expression of affection
in the workplace is a really interesting thing. Because I
do a podcast with Kara Swisher and she was saying
that she's experienced, and I believe her so many just
creepy moments with men who feel at liberty to invade
a woman's space, and I believe that and I've seen it.
(04:44):
I also asked her, have there been moments of expression
of affection at work that you've appreciated, and she said yes,
And I said, well, some of us need help figuring
out the gray zone in between that and the reaction
right now among all men at work is that there's
absolutely no affection. There's no real open, honest style logged.
There isn't even joking, and I think it's creating a
lack of camaraderie and quite frankly, a lack of career
(05:05):
advancement in connection for the people who needed the most.
I was in sales and banking. One could say, oh
my god, it's sexist that you had to make dinner reservations.
What were you doing going to places like that? Guess what?
Me going to those dinners and getting myself a seat
every single night was great for my career. And to
say I'm going to use my feminine wiles. It's not
(05:26):
feminine wiles or sexuality, but women do have high emotional
intelligence and people might invite me to dinner because I'm
gonna make the table move faster. I'm gonna make the
clients feel good, not in a sexual way, but in
a personal way. And that personal connection, building trust with
the senior people at the bank and with our clients
is what catapulted my business. You know how this problem
(05:49):
gets solved, and this is going to sound politically correct.
You're generous with people. And the thing that is protected
or been the kind of the kryptonite of my firms
from ever having a complaint or a lawsuit is that
early on and I recognize this underinvested asset called young
female leadership, and that is if you gave him a
little bit of flexibility. They were outstanding assets that weren't
appreciated by traditional corporate America. So at L two, which
(06:12):
we sold two years ago, nine of the eleven largest
equity holders were either LGBT or women. And you know what,
when you have women and LGBT people running the company,
this just never happens. And there was this kind of
underinvested asset. And now finally sevent of high school val
electorians or women, they're finally catching up in the workplace.
We have a different crisis of the making, though, and
(06:34):
that is young men are failing. And I see it
in my organization. The women are thriving. The young women
are thriving. Where women hit a hit a wall. And
this is where the nuance comes in is when women
have kids. So women without kids have closed the wage gap.
Women with kids immediately dropped to seventy seven cents on
the dollar. But Scott, corporate America, even government was designed
(06:54):
in a way under the assumption that corporate leader does
their job and there is a separate person in their
home that manages their children and their household. That's how
the model was created. I remember before I had my
first child, thinking I'm going to run the securities division
a Deutsche Bank. I remember the day I came back
from eternity leave, looking across at the head of the
(07:16):
securities division and thinking for a moment, Holy cow, that
guy is on the road forty weeks a year. And
at that moment, I thought, well, maybe I'll just be
the biggest producer. And unless we start to look at
what people's priorities are men and women, I don't think
you're going to change that for women. Look, evolution and
biology is pretty powerful, and no matter how politically correct,
(07:36):
we are the contribution that men want to make in
the home. I do think that women's instant. You know,
when our kids get up at night, my wife, here's
the footsteps. She's just trained to that noise. And while
I'd like to think I contribute, I'm not sure. My
wife worked at Goldman Sacks for five years and yet
we found that the majority of the time she was
the one getting up And I'm not proud of that,
(07:58):
But it's a how do we rate or compensate for
that type of balance? And I think corporate America is
trying to slowly but surely increased maternity leave. One thing
I noticed about Goldman was they tried to be pretty
empathetic to women with children, or at least they played
FaceTime about it, but at the end of the day,
she couldn't on a moment's notice go to Detroit and
be with General Motors for the meeting because we had
two kids under the age of five. So I think
(08:21):
corporate America has sort of figured out what I'll call
the male female wage dynamic. What they haven't figured out
is people with ovaries. They haven't figured out how to
create career velocity for people who decide to fulfill the
most important attribute of the species, and that is propagation.
We just haven't figured it out yet. Well, it's hard
to do that because when you're in your family raising
(08:42):
childbirth years, that's when listen, a thirty one year old
investment banker, that's when he or she is in his lane, right.
I would never ever say it out loud. But when
I think back to when I was in banking and
I would interview associates that were men and women, I
would never say this out loud. I'm sure in the
back of my head I thought, well, I think she's engaged,
(09:03):
we're getting married. When she having kids, she's going to
come back right and that, And I would obviously never
say it out last time, but I know it impacted
me because, especially in those industries, you need horses to
run around the track. Imagine you're the suit of a
small company that's venture backed and you have sort of
(09:24):
a twenty four kind of haul pass to survive and
the infanmortality rate on small businesses, and you're interviewing two
HBS grads and once a guy who's totally paranoid and
worried and hungry because he has two new kids at
home and you know it's gonna work eighteen hours a day.
And one is that young woman who has just gotten married,
and you're thinking, Okay, what happens when she gets pregnant?
(09:48):
And I want to be a good guy and give
him maternity leave, and you want to do the right thing,
but unfortunately sometimes you wonder can I afford to do
the right thing. You check yourself and you stop that thinking.
But there's just no way you can control those thoughts.
But to that point when we get offended when the
president says America first, isn't America first? Kind of the
way we run our families, take care of our own
(10:09):
family first, and then in our excess capacity, give to others. Yeah,
but the wonderful thing about capitalism is it assumes that
a basic human attribute of our species is that we're
going to fix our own oxygen masks before helping others.
Self interest is the most powerful motivating force in the world,
and it's the basis of capitalism. At the end of
(10:29):
the day, the baker doesn't give the butcher bread for
that person's well being, but because they want meat in return.
It's a powerful engine. But also a key to capitalism
is this notion of democracy and the rule of fair play.
And we also believe in progressive tax structure that we
have a baseline level of redistribution of income. The game
might be tilted, but at least it's not rigged. And
I would argue over the last thirty years that the
(10:51):
middle class has figured out slowly but surely. Corporations have
become government, the tax systems become rigged. Okay, But Scott,
here's the thing. What you are asking for is moral leadership.
I think we are the avengers of the galaxy. We
are the superheroes. American Disabilities Act, the Civil Rights Act,
that there's been, Social Security, all these things were hugely expensive,
(11:14):
hugely unpopular, and we did them. I think there's been thousands,
if not millions, of people who have shown incredible moral
leadership been class traders. Whether it's Teddy Roosevelt saying to
the railroad guys, you elected me, I love you, but
guess what I'm breaking you up, whether it was FDR
being a class trader to his rich friends by increasing
taxes so he could have more social welfare so people
(11:36):
didn't die in poverty. Traditionally throughout history, it's very clear
when we get to the current levels of income inequality
that we have. The good news is they always self correct.
Income inequality self correct. That's the bad news. The mechanisms
of self correction are either war, famine, or revolution, and
that is people get so fed up they turned to
(11:57):
nationalism and they start demonizing immigrants, or they turn to
some sort of government overthrow through socialism. We end up
with jobs. At some point, when you look out your
window and you see everyone with pitchforks, you realize, well,
maybe it's time, you know, maybe it should be more
than let them et kick. I think we're at that point.
The last time we had these levels of income inequality
was in the twenties, right before the crash, and people
(12:17):
are so fed up an economy and a society can't
survive without a prospering middle class, and the middle class
in America has either been sideways most general to sleep
for the last thirty years, probably going down. And we're
in the midst of a soft revolution and a manifest
itself in different ways. Hold on a second, because we
have so much more to talk about. We'll be right
back after a quick rate. Welcome back to modern rules.
(12:43):
There's calls for seventy taxes and the elimination of air
transport and a billionaire super tax. There's calls to put
Lori Laughlin not Aunt Becky in prison. I empathize with her.
I'm an academic, and I do think it's probably easy
to incrementally decided to make bad decisions around getting your
kids into school, because as an academic, I can tell
you we become drunk on exclusivity. We have lost the
(13:05):
script as academics. We used to think we were public servants.
Now we think we're luxury goods and minding. And my
director of admission stand up every year and brag about
how impossible it is for kids to get into school,
which creates this hunger games where if you get into
a good school, you're going to do great, and if
you don't, you're kind of, for lack of a better term,
you're screwed. Right, bad decisions. We all end up in
(13:27):
the arms race, and you say, well, I can't parent
in a vacuum. I've got to get in the mix. Right.
Maybe this was maybe was born when Princeton Review was created,
however many years ago. But it's impossible. Like I, I
do understand the slippery slope and how you become one
of those parents who bought their way into school. But
(13:48):
it is a slippery slope. But it's also impossible to
get out of the game because you do want to
do what's right for your kids. We clear out all
the physical obstacles for our children, so our kids have
never been physically safer. But the result is we've used
so many sanitary wipes on our kids lives that they
aren't developing the immunities they need. And then when they
get to college, we have record levels of depression and suicide.
(14:10):
The number of emergency room admittances of teens who are
self harming or attempted suicide has doubled in the last
thirty six months. You combine that with the fact that
these kids are now on screens more than they're on TV,
and not only do they see the party that they're
missing out on, they see it play out in real time.
You have record levels of team depression. You know what
is the biggest risk to our happiness? Stephanie? For you
(14:31):
and me, the biggest risk to our happiness is the
combination of good intentions but concierge bulldoz are parenting that
you and I are probably both a little bit guilty of,
and combination with Instagram and these weapons of mass destruction
entrenchment by mostly teenage girls. We talk about toxic masculinity.
There's something called toxic femininity playing out in high schools
(14:52):
right now, and one of our kids gets really depressed
and upset. You want our lives to be taken off track.
We are facing an emerging mental health crisis in why
won't we acknowledge this? Right? Mean girls, for example, exist.
I see it in my personal life every day. If
you look at Instagram, it's the epicenter of it. Yet
it's something we're not willing to talk about. It's too
(15:14):
offensive to talk about. Well, it goes back to this
notion that I talk about genders I think embracing your
gender is hugely rewarding. I think embracing your masculinity is
hugely rewarding. Embracing your femininity is hugely rewarding. That doesn't
mean you have to be a bad person. That doesn't
mean you have to be silly or oppressive or toxic
or embracing your lack of your gender neutrality if that
(15:36):
is what makes you happy. But right now we have
a conversation where you're not allowed to acknowledge the sexes
are different. So, for example, boys, and this is scientifically based,
bully physically and verbally. We punch each other and then
call each other names and it's upsetting, but it's usually
kind of over girls. Bully relationally it is really damaging
(15:56):
to other girls. It is actually more toxic than physically,
you know, holding someone down and hitting them or giving
them a weggie. When you start tactically, goes more thoughtful
and they're more mature. They pick a victim and they
start using these nuclear weapons of mockery and self esteem
destroying called Instagram. But in a conniving way. Why do
you think the movie Mean Girls was Why do we
(16:18):
think the book was written? I was it created out
of nowhere, right the movie Heathers existed, So we're going
to pretend that all women completely tell the truths and
we're all sisters. I have, without a doubt, had more
women stabbed me in the back, and by the way,
I've been rough on some girls too, And right now
we are unwilling to say that. First off, we have
(16:39):
to acknowledge that the sexes are different, and that's okay,
But right now you can even have a conversation that
acknowledges any differences. What we haven't in high schools, though,
I think it is really dangerous because we have kids
who aren't developing the immunities we have. So for example,
the number of teens that see their friends every day
has been cut in half in ten years. So there's
some good things. There's less team pregnancy, and there's less
(17:01):
drunk driving than ever before. But the bad news is
the reason kids aren't driving drunk or having sex is
because their home on Instagram feeling bad about themselves. So
there's a trade off here. We're going to be right
back after a quick break, welcome back to modern rules.
One of the dangers about our segregation of rich kids
(17:23):
from middle class from poor kids in the school system
is decreasing the amount of empathy we have for each other.
I went to a public school. I had friends who
are rich. I was squarely. I was part of the
upper lower middle class. And then I had friends my
One of my closest friends was a kid named Ronnie Drake,
and African American kid whose only way to college was
to get a scholarship at Lynn University in Oregon. And
I think I aspired to do more because I saw
(17:45):
my rich friends going to great universities. I think I
had more empathy for Ronnie. And the problem now is
we are separating everybody from everybody else. I think kids
have a lack of empathy. I think their parents are
clearing out all the obstacles for him and not letting
them develop immunities. And then you combine that with all
this screen time, and we have what is a brewing
mental health crisis. And it's the biggest risk. You're in
(18:06):
my happiness because you have your world of work, you
have your world of friends, you have your world of fun,
you have your world of kids. When something comes off
the rails with one of your kids, and everyone hears
on their Instagram thing, and then these guys have kids.
I can tell you're literally your world collapses. I mean,
all of a sudden, the work, the friends all goes
away when something comes off the rails with one of
your kids. But where's the balance, because in terms of
(18:26):
helicopter parenting, on one hand, you and I had no
choice but to work it out. That's my family motto
at home. But now that I know my oldest son
is dyslexic. And of course, when your kid gets diagnosed,
then you get tested and then we realize I am
but I never got diagnosed. I worked through it, and
maybe working through it, maybe working it out led to
(18:46):
my success. But I don't want my kids to struggle.
So then they get the bumpers and they and then
you're down a vortex of an osteopath and an occupational
therapist and on time testing, and then you are putting
your kid on a tiny little cloud of love and
they're just waiting to get decapitated. So how do we
(19:09):
find the right balance here? The honest answers, I don't know.
I think we're all trying to figure this stuff out.
You said something earlier or in the beginning, when you
said listen, like I know when I walk into my
classroom or a meeting. I'm already in a tough spot
because I'm the white guy. But here's why we keep
saying that. And we're saying like, the toughest place to
be is to be a white guy right now, and
(19:30):
there's a war on men. Except and listen, you and
I were on TV earlier and the seven banks cus
you know, are testifying on the hill, and somebody else
on air with us said, well, the seven white guys
walked in, So you're right, those seven white guys have
to endure people like me rolling our eyes saying, man,
seven white guys running banks. But guess what, there are
still seven white guys running banks. There are still almost
(19:53):
exclusively white guys running the planet. So to me, this
war on men, yes, we had a record. I'm of
women win in the last selection, but look at the data.
We're not taking over anything would still make less money.
That's like what Chris Rock said that if you actually
gave white men the power to change their gender and
their race, they would probably decide to just ride this
whole white guy thing out. You credit your character and
(20:15):
your hard work for your success, and then you credit
the market for your failures, and I constantly try and
virtue signal talking about the fact I was raised by
a single immigrant mother. But as a white male, you
don't realize, as white heterosexual amounts just how many small
advantages you're given every day. What I was referring to
is in the conversation around me too, or anything like this,
you have a lack of credibility, and I think there's
(20:36):
a certain assumption that you're just sort of a little
bit guilty that just by virtue of being a white
heterosexual male, you're probably one of the perpetrators on some level,
even if it's unwitting. So I agree with you, and
of instances, you know, white male privilege is still there.
I do think it's getting better, and it's getting better
for the right reasons. You know. It is a great
leveler as competition. One of the reasons the Americans beat
(20:59):
the access p hours was we brought women into the workforce,
and we kind of never turned back. When Americans wanted
to maintain their standard of living, women went into the workforce.
We no longer have the luxury of as much discrimination
as we used to because you go out of business.
So competition in America, the desire to be more competitive,
the desire to have a great firm. We no longer
(21:20):
have the luxury of saying, but Bob played lacrosse at Princeton.
It's like, well, you know what, Susie is just better
than Bob, right, so we're gonna promote Susie. And the
weird thing that's happening. What I see is there's a
lot of men in their thirties and forties in my
generation that feel that we're sort of have this birthright
to being promoted because we have outdoor plumbing, and we're white,
(21:41):
and and there's this crisis of okay, finding the realizy
you know what, that doesn't cut it anymore. It just
doesn't cut it anymore. And there's a lot of self
loathing and anger. But the reality is it's overdue, and
the great equalizer here has been competition. I think it's
a good thing. I think capitalism works. I think ultimately
our desire to win starts starching out the luxury of bigotry.
(22:03):
And I think things are headed largely in the right direction.
Other than the aberration of the last thirty months things,
I think on the whole, you know, the arc of
justice is curved, but it does bend towards justice. I
do think we're headed in the right direction. We unpacked
a lot in that conversation, but what I really took
away from Scott is that every issue we're covering today
(22:26):
that we think is monumental never before, well, guess what,
it's not new. There are years and years of nuance
and social advancement and struggle by every one of these
matters we deal with today, and perhaps the things you
are not supposed to say out loud, if you say them,
you realize that other people are thinking are dealing with
(22:47):
the same thing. Thank you for listening to today's bonus episode,
and thank you for bringing an open mind and helping
us create what are hopefully modern rules. That's it for
(23:08):
today's episode. I'm your host, Stephanie Rule. A very very
special thanks to the extraordinary people who made this happen.
My producers Julie Brown, Samantha Ullen and Anne Bark, Audio,
Michael Batt for booking and wrangling, the amazing guests who
joined us, Julian Weller for editing and bill plaques, Michael
Azar and Jacobo Penzo for their recording expertise. Special thanks
(23:30):
to Steve lick Tag, Barbara Rab, Jonathan Wald, Marie Dugo,
Holly traz Nikki Etre and Christina Everett are Executive producers
are Conald Byrne and Mangesh Hatigador, And of course, the
men who brought us all together, Chairman and CEO of
I Heart Media Bob Pittman and Chairman of NBC News
Andy Lack. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
(23:51):
the i Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows
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