There is some real concern that people like Hasan Piker or soon-to-be Representative Shiovalier will be used to convince moderates that, quite frankly, Democrats have lost their mind and to vote Democratic, just as we highlight some of the more extreme views on the Republican side to try and convince moderates that the Republicans are just flat-out crazy. Is the Democratic Party at risk of being taken over by extremes, and should big food be regulated like big tobacco? Today we answer questions on democratic socialism, America's obesity crisis, boomer wealth, and what makes a great hire.
Question number one comes from Dan Fure on Reddit. "Hey Scott, I've seen some Democrats online express concerns over the DSA, Hasan Piker, and recent wins including El-Sayed, but then state they will vote straight blue because the Trump administration is the greater threat. Republicans didn't push back on extremists, and now the Republicans are the party of Trump. Do you fear something like this could happen with the Democrats?"
Okay, for some data: the Democratic Socialists of America says its membership has grown from 6,400 in 2016 to 120,000 today. That's an increase of nearly 19-fold. DSA-backed candidates have also won several prominent primaries this year, including victories over established Democratic incumbents. But its reach remains, at this point, limited. Nationally, only a third, or 32%, of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they like political leaders who identify as democratic socialists. The majority, 56%, say they neither like nor dislike them. Support is concentrated, as you would think, in the party's left: 52% of liberal Democrats like democratic socialist leaders compared to just 15% of moderates and conservatives.
According to Brookings, most DSA-backed candidates have competed in places that already lean heavily Democratic. Of 282 candidates examined, only 10 won primaries in states or districts that were not already overwhelmingly Democratic. So, let's talk about El-Sayed, his primary win. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Democratic primary with 745,000 votes, or 48.4% of the electorate, compared with Haley Stevens' 731,000 votes, or 47.6%. That was a margin of about 14,000 votes, less than one percentage point. And I would also argue that Stevens wasn't a great candidate. In other words, it was an important victory, but not evidence of an overwhelming ideological mandate from a swing state.
There's a limit to the comparison with Trump. Trump's grip on the GOP grew over time. In 2018, his average primary endorsement came about seven weeks before Election Day. This cycle, it came roughly seven months beforehand. Nearly three-quarters of the endorsements this cycle went to incumbents, suggesting Trumpism is now part of the Republican establishment. And so the DSA may be growing, but its victories remain concentrated in heavily Democratic areas. Everyone's calling Mamdani a kingmaker, and to a certain extent he is, but only locally. And the elections he weighed in on were not about electing a DSA candidate over a Republican; it was about electing the more extreme DSA candidate.
I think that there is some real concern that people like Hasan Piker or soon-to-be Representative Shiovalier will be used to convince moderates that, quite frankly, Democrats have lost their mind and to vote Democratic, just as we highlight some of the more extreme views on the Republican side to try and convince moderates that the Republicans are just flat-out crazy. What's happened here? One, people want change. If you're under the age of 40, what you have witnessed is, in addition to COVID, you've witnessed this transfer of wealth and opportunity from your generation to older generations, incredible income inequality, what feels like a coarseness and a meanness that runs through our politics, and a general acceptance that it's okay not to care about the lower middle class and the prospects of the young.
Some of that is inflated by the media and social media, which divides us. There's a decent argument that we're actually not that divided, but we have social media dividing us. But in some very few young people, less than a quarter of young people think that America is on the right track. So it's not on the right track, and that track is capitalism. So you embrace another economic model. And the most obvious other economic model is socialism. There are some northern European countries that could claim to be capitalist who embrace socialism. And that's the problem with the word socialism. Socialism means controlling the means of production. You could argue that the Trump administration is the most socialist presidency we've had in a long time, taking shares in U.S. Steel and Intel.
I think they get the word wrong. I think what they mean, or what they aspire to in the DSA, is just a stronger social safety net. I think some of the crazies on the right who they bring on Fox to just see how ridiculous they are do not represent even the extreme part of the party. The difference and the mistake is calling northern European countries socialist, as many of them, most of them, are actually in many ways more capitalist than us. They let free markets reign. They let companies start more easily than many of their European counterparts, and they also let them go out of business. We've become fond of bailing out companies, which again is just another transfer of wealth from the entrants to the incumbents, propping up the old people who own companies such that new entrants or younger people don't have the opportunity to go in and buy a failed restaurant for pennies on the dollar.
So young people think this isn't working. This is capitalism. So they go to socialism. Also, to be fair, many of the DSA candidates are generational talent. El-Sayed is very compelling. Mamdani is a unique talent politically, and unfortunately for centrists such as myself, at least at a kind of local level, I think you'd argue our bench is great for president. We do have a lot of moderates: Shapiro, Bashir, Pritzker, Newsom are all moderates. Captain Mark Kelly, Senator Kelly from Arizona, is a moderate. But it does feel as if the voices in our dialogue right now, that centrists and moderates don't appear to have the same mojo as an AOC, a Bernie Sanders, or a Mamdani. In some movements are led and driven by spokespeople, and our spokespeople in the center just aren't as compelling right now.
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Question number two comes from Mesa, who emailed us. They say, "Dear Scott, while the rising costs of healthcare are frequently discussed, I rarely hear about the impact of our food supply and the major food companies responsible for the sharp rise in obesity. Is the food industry considered untouchable, similar to the defense industry? I would love to hear your thoughts on this." So, we did a deep dive on this topic back in June with Dr. Jessica Nurick. When asked about what policy she would change to move the needle on American health, she mentioned repealing the Citizens United decision made by the Supreme Court. What a shocker. There's just been a concentration in the industry and a lack of regulation, and the connection between industrial production and shareholder value and health has just been totally broken, if you will. In 2010, this ruling reversed campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections.
I would get money out of politics. So, get rid of Citizens United. I'd get rid of Citizens United. I think everything flows down from there. So, say more. Give us an example of that. A lot of public health policy goes against kind of corporate incentives. And so I think a lot of times when we're trying to get policies passed, we're up against huge lobbying arms and huge lobbying arms of particular industries. And so I think that if you got rid of that, you would have politicians who were looking out more for these public health policies, more for the health of individuals and their constituents, than they are actually being able to fund their campaigns or being able to please their donors.
So, the scale of the problem is staggering. Obesity affects 21% of children and 40% of adults, actually 70% of adults are either obese or overweight. But think about that. Almost half of American adults are obese, and it costs the U.S. healthcare system nearly $173 billion a year, according to the CDC. Ultra-processed foods account for roughly 53% of the calories consumed by American adults and two-thirds of those consumed by children. Italy, by comparison, less than 20%. So what about willpower? In addition to food, in 2019, the National Institute of Health ran a study with 20 adults, having them eat ultra-processed food for two weeks and then unprocessed for another two weeks. The food was matched for calories, sugar, fat, and fiber, and participants were told to eat as much as they wanted. On the processed diet, they ate 500 more calories a day and gained two pounds in two weeks. The NIH called it the first study to demonstrate that ultra-processed food makes people overeat.
In the laboratories, they're not trying to figure out what is good for you. They're trying to figure out what's addictive, and it's literally an explosion of, you know, this, as Bill Maher called it, an orgasm in your mouth, such that you just continue to eat this shitty food. The industry's influence is just remarkable. From 1998 through 2020, ultra-processed food companies spent an estimated $1.2 billion lobbying the federal government, more than the tobacco, alcohol, or gaming industries. In the first half of 2025 alone, the American Beverage Association spent $1.7 million on federal lobbying, doubling its spending during the same period the year before. Could this be a big tobacco moment, or do we need a big tobacco moment? This year, San Francisco filed the first government lawsuit seeking to hold major food manufacturers accountable for ultra-processed foods. The suit accuses 10 companies, including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, and Nestlé, of using deceptive marketing and designing products to encourage overconsumption, drawing an explicit comparison to tobacco companies. It's the first case of its kind brought by the government rather than an individual consumer.
There's a general playbook here. Create a product that's addictive and ignore the externalities. Capture shareholder value by a small number of companies and people, and normalize or socialize the downside and the massive expense being incurred. There's a transfer of wealth going on from citizens paying taxes to fund Medicare and Medicaid and healthcare subsidies going to people who are obese and have obesity-related illnesses, specifically diabetes, caused by food companies processing companies that are allowed to create shitty, inexpensive food that has no connection and it's dangerous food because they wash over Washington with money and create regulatory capture such that these companies can capture shareholder value, which, by the way, is a fraction of the cost they create further downstream. What do we do? We need more court cases and liability. And we need cabinet members overseeing our healthcare system that aren't just fucking idiots. We'll be right back after a quick break.
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Our next question comes from Blister on Reddit. They say, "Hi, Scott. You regularly display a high level of conviction on outcomes that are highly uncertain. You are wrong frequently, but that doesn't seem to faze you. It's a quality that a lot of very successful people possess, but I expect it's a product of success, or at least exacerbated by it, rather than an innate quality of successful people. I'd be curious to hear you reflect on that and how your confidence and conviction has evolved throughout your life."
I'm not sure if you're saying I'm confident or full of shit. I think the answer is probably both. I've been in the predictions business for a long time. So, my first, my only real job was at Morgan Stanley, where you were trying to predict the direction of bonds or fixed income or stocks. So, you would do your homework and then you'd have a viewpoint. The juice, if you will, is in predicting the uncertain, because, all right, if I turn this light on, if I flip the switch, most likely the lights will go on. No one's going to pay you to tell them that. They're going to pay you to give you an, to provide an informed position. And the thing about predictions is it's not being right that matters. It's catalyzing an interesting conversation that results in better outcomes.
Okay, I believe that a third of Levi's sales will be done online by 2010. I was wrong. I made that prediction in 2000. Levi Strauss & Company was my biggest client. I was in the, I had a strategy firm for 20 years. You're in the business of trying to create or fashion a future. And your job isn't really to predict the exact future. It's to create a series of possible scenarios such that you can plan against that future with strategy and resource allocation that best fits a number of different outcomes.
So I don't make predictions haphazardly. I read a lot. I look at a lot of data, and when I make a prediction, I actually believe it's going to happen. And again, the objective isn't to be right, but to catalyze a conversation that results in better outcomes. The key is to be right more than wrong. And occasionally, what's really exciting is you see something someone else doesn't, and you say, this is what I think is going on, and this is what I think is going to happen. And you get more right than you get credit for. Predictions are actually a shitty business because the judgment body of people, if you make a prediction that ends up being correct, in between the time you make the prediction and it coming true, it becomes less provocative, less interesting, less bold. Right?
I predicted Amazon would buy Whole Foods. Before they purchased Whole Foods, that seemed incredibly provocative and even crazy. They had never made an acquisition of that size, much less a grocer. But soon after they made the acquisition, it seemed obvious. It seemed rational. It didn't seem that provocative or risky to predict. I predicted WeWork would not go public. That after reading the S-1, that investors would gag on this ridiculous ayahuasca trip form of a prospectus. When I said that, when the prospectus came out, the entire media world lit up about me saying that. After the IPO was pulled, it was, well, of course it was pulled. It was obvious now in retrospect. In terms of what started that, what I would suggest is looking at data and then trying to draw a throughput line through the data and what happens where it gets.
What's really interesting in the predictions I really enjoy is I don't think people take into account that the people making these decisions are human, and most of them are huge-ego, midlife-crisis men who I relate to, and I can put myself, I can put my feet in their shoes. And oftentimes my predictions are not only based on macro data and social trends, but how I think a 58-year-old CEO might be thinking about this issue. Anyways, I love making predictions. I think it's important. At the end of the day, the way I kind of vote with my pocketbook is I invest in a lot of the predictions I make. Some I get wrong, some I get right. But here's the key: you just need to get more right than wrong.
Also, what's changed as I've gotten older is I realize that as my platform has grown, I have a greater responsibility to do more work on predictions that might upset people or change policy. I said something about San Francisco last week, and the mayor actually called me, and I realized that I've got to be, while I still believe what I said, I've got to be, I don't know, just a little bit more thoughtful, careful. That's good and bad, as my platform has grown.
Our next question comes from Hope for Best 47 on Reddit. They say, "You've often said boomers have voted themselves wealth and advantages. You're a numbers guy, so I'm generally curious about the data behind that characterization. Are you describing the median boomer, the aggregate wealth of the generation, or the political influence of the cohort? Those seem like different claims, and I'm generally interested in how you distinguish among them." Let's talk about the data. Boomers hold over half, 52%, of all U.S. household wealth. Gen X holds 26%, millennials 11%. They're about 20% of the adult population, so their share of the wealth is greater than twice the share of the rest of the populace. Boomers held almost 20% of all household wealth back when they were 25 to 43. Millennials at roughly that same age hold 10%. So it's not just, well, as you get older you aggregate more wealth. This generation has had more wealth at the same age as current generations.
Now let's take a look at the different averages. Boomer wealth totals about $89 trillion, which averages out to $1.6 million per boomer. The median boomer has closer to $370,000. So there's some very wealthy people that drag the mean up, but the median is much lower. At ages 65 to 74, the average net worth is $1.8 million and the median is $410,000. The average here is more than four times the middle. The reason for the gap, again, the wealthiest 10% of boomer households hold roughly 71% of all boomer wealth. We refer to this as income inequality. On their political influence: three-quarters of Americans over 65 voted in 2024, the highest rate of any age group. The federal government spends $41,000 a year per adult on people over 65. And get this, we spend $7,000 per child. That's almost six times more.
And so the American democracy is working too well. People who vote in large proportions vote themselves $41,000 a year. Kids who don't vote end up getting about $7,000 a year. We spend more on ICE right now than we're spending on our children. By 2035, we're projected to spend three times more on interest on the national debt than we spent on children. Debt to fuel a cocaine- and champagne-filled party for me. And the closest a younger generation got was they got to throw their credit card in, which I keep running up. And my credit card debt is going to be inherited by them. There's nothing they can do about it.
Some more stats on wealth. 48% of boomers owned a home by age 30. For millennials today, it's 33%. The median first-time home buyer was 29 years old in 1981. Today, they're 40. Public college tuition, adjusted for inflation, went from $3,300 a year in 1974 to almost $10,000 today. I just don't think there's any arguing that American democracy is working way too well. If you were going to describe our electoral system, it would be the following: a bunch of old people voting in even older people who vote themselves more money.
We've always had older people voting in greater proportion. But before, we seemed to embrace a greater gestalt of paying it forward, of investing in technologies, of investing in infrastructure, of a progressive tax rate such that we could redistribute income to the middle class. Quite frankly, it just feels as if my generation are fuckers that were standing on the shoulders of investments made by previous middle-class households that we are not, in fact, willing to make ourselves. That the progressive tax rates for the wealthiest in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, whether you agree with them or not, were 70, 80, and 90%.
Absolutely. We had a much more progressive tax structure. The percentage of GDP paid in taxes by corporations is at an all-time low. The percentage of taxes paid by wage earners as a percentage of GDP is at an all-time high. Do the math. Who makes wages? Young people. Who owns assets? See above, lower capital gains. People my age. The two biggest tax deductions in our tax code are mortgage home interest rates and capital gains. Who owns stocks and homes? People my age. Who makes their money working and renting? Young people. The sucking sound has got to stop, and the flow has got to be reduced.
Simply put, our economy is the following: earners, owners, and customers. We have, through regulatory capture, decided to transfer money and power from the earners and the consumer to the owner. Full stop. So, if you own shares, it's great. It's great to be an owner. If you are trying to make a living and becoming an owner, or if you're a consumer on the other end of concentration through regulatory capture, quite frankly, you're the one paying for the bill of baby boomers who have aggregated more wealth than any generation in history.
And by the way, what's the greatest transfer of wealth in history that happens every year? Social Security, where young people transfer $1.4 trillion to old people. Why? It's a great program. It's taken senior poverty from 20% to 10%. I should never get Social Security. Most of the people, or maybe some of the people listening to this podcast, shouldn't get Social Security. It's a tax. It's not a pension system. Why do we keep transferring $1.5 trillion from a generation that's more anxious, more obese, and more depressed than any previous generation of that age to the oldest, richest generation in history? Shouldn't Social Security be going the other way?
That's all for this episode. To submit a question for next time, email a voice recording to officehours.com. That's officehours.com, or post it on the Scott Galloway subreddit.
