Please welcome your hosts Ed Elson and Scott Galloway.
How we doing?
Pretty good. Pretty good. It's great to be here. How you doing, Scott?
I'm doing really well, Ed. How are you?
I'm doing very well. So, and I don't know if you know this, but do you know who a Florida resident is?
I think I have an idea. I think it might be you. Do you know whose sister went to the University of Florida?
I think that might be Scott Galloway.
Do you know whose kids went to school in Delray Beach? Do you know whose father moved to Ocala, Florida, and his fourth marriage? Ed, do you know... Do you know who got an apartment in the Continuum in South Beach and bought an electric blue Maserati in 2003 thinking it would get him laid? It didn't, Ed. It didn't. And do you know who met the mother of his sons at the Raleigh Hotel and whose middle... and then 18 months later had a son whose middle name is Raleigh.
That's right. Give it up. Give it up for Scott's kids.
Thank you for coming. It's great to see you all.
With that, Scott, could you begin our show?
Sure. Today's number, $3.5 billion. That's the cost of the Blue Origin New Glenn rocket that blew up on the launchpad two days ago. Ed.
Ed, what do you call a gay man on the moon?
I call a gay man on the moon... I'm not sure. I'm an astronaut, you [__] homophobe.
It's actually pretty good. Usually it's shocking and terrible, and that one is... Yeah, it's good.
That's why we're here. So, you know, he's going to ruin everything.
I'm in Miami, a little stressed. So I decided to bring my boyfriend with me, and he's super into choking and asked me to choke him. So I reluctantly agreed, but I don't think he's into it. For the last 7 hours, he's been still and giving me the silent treatment.
I love it. Okay, we got our team.
An astronaut. You homophobe.
So, it's great to be here in Miami. You know, we talk a lot on this podcast about the death of drinking, which I know you feel very strongly about, the death of partying, the fact that young Americans increasingly today are not going out. They're not socializing. They're not going to clubs, partying. They're doing none of this. Which is why I'm so grateful and so excited to be here in Miami, which is one of the only cities in America which is actually bucking that trend. I want to give you a couple of pieces of data here that I found related to Miami. So the first number that I have is $2.5 billion. That is how much the nightlife industry here made in 2025. And the other number is 13%. That is how much nightlife here has grown as an industry since COVID, which is four times the national average. So, let me just give it up to Miami for keeping the party alive. You guys are crushing it. What do you make of those stats, Scott?
So, the drinking, the drinks industry, if you will, the stocks of Pernod Ricard and Diageo are literally at 20-year lows. Drinking has in fact fallen off the face of the map. For the first time in recorded history, people under the age of 30, more of them than not don't drink. And you know, I've said and I've gotten a lot of pushback for this, but my advice to young people is to go out and drink more and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off. And I reverse engineer everything to sort of a business analogy. And the fastest zero to a billion dollar companies in history typically go 80% of the leader for 50% of the price. And there's kind of a powerful axiom, and I think the same thing is true with respect to alcohol, drugs, and that is I think you want to optimize your life, and I'm being serious now, to about 80%. And that is if there's science actually shows that about 95% of the health benefits, 95% of the nutrition benefits, 95% of the sleep benefits top out at about 80% of what the maximum would be. I've been working out four times a week for 40 years. Why? So I could drink a [__] ton. And show me a guy who tracks his sleep obsessively, I'm going to show you a guy that doesn't track the emotional well-being of the person sleeping next to him. This is, you know, for God's sakes, eat...
You just offended the crowd. Yeah.
Yeah. That didn't go over well with most of the male audience. I mean, for God's sakes, eat well. Focus on your sleep, but occasionally order dessert. Occasionally drink too much. It's not about... Sure, it's about lifespan and it's about healthspan, but it's about funspan. That's... for God's sakes. That's why we're here. So, anyways, simply put, you were talking about... I think we got to spend more time, if you will, quote unquote, in the club.
This is our special effect part of the show.
That's what our creative team came up with last night. What'd you come up with?
There we go. This is what it's all about.
Welcome to Miami, Scott.
That's perfect. Thank you. Thank you.
Miami, this is for you. Cheers.
Cheers.
So, in a moment, we're going to have everyone... We were told some alcohol run through the crowd here. And so, if you want to drink with us, please indulge. Before we get into our show though, I want to play a little game. And that is every time Scott says what we call a Scottism, and I think you all kind of know what I'm talking about, something that he says at least like 10 times a podcast. Every time that he says one of those things, what we're all going to do is we're just going to take a drink together. So, I promise I will be taking a shot of this Don Julio here in the spirit of nightlife every time Scott says a Scottism. How do you feel about that game, Scott Galloway?
I feel good. Yeah, but like I said, I don't know if he's gay, but he gives great head.
Cheers, everyone. All right. Feeling a bit of the buzz. Feels good. We should probably get into our first story.
What do you think about that?
Go for it. Just trust your instincts.
Is this getting old yet? So Scott, Florida has long lured people in with its beaches, its sunshine, its nightclubs, and also its extremely low taxes. The state has no income tax, no estate tax, no capital gains tax, and as a result, it has increasingly become the new home for America's wealthiest. In the past two decades, the number of billionaires living in the Sunshine State has grown 20-fold.
And with the California wealth tax proposal looming over Silicon Valley, many more tech magnates are moving in, from Sergey Brin to Larry Page to Mark Zuckerberg, who just bought a house nearby. So with Florida's newfound reputation as the billionaire bunker, that's what some people are calling it. The question for Floridians is, is this a good thing for the economy? Is it a good thing for the state or is it a bad thing? What do you think, Scott?
So, I think a lot about brand. I teach a brand strategy course for the last 25 years, and I think about what are some of the best brand moves, some of the worst brand moves. By the way, worst brand move of the last 72 hours is having tech literally [__] up one of the best brands in the world, Ferrari. That is just the stupidest tech product since the Cybertruck. But an amazing brand move last year. I think the American Pope is going to be great for the American brand. I think cutting us... probably the worst brand move for the United States in a long time. Believing that this state is low tax is one of the most elegant brand moves. And there was a lot of applause. But let me just be clear. It's total [__] that you're a low tax state. What you are is you have figured out a way to elegantly brand a transfer of wealth from young people who earn their money through work to old people like me who make money through selling and buying stocks. So you may think this is a low tax state. It's not. It's a transfer of wealth from earners and lower and middle income households to wealthy owners. For example, you have a fairly healthy state sales tax, which taxes consumption at 6%. Someone making $10 million a year maybe consumes one-tenth of their income, so they're effectively paying a 0.6% sales tax. Someone who makes $50,000 a year uses all of their money on consumption, they're paying the full 6%. You have some of the highest property taxes in the nation. If you're very wealthy, yeah, maybe you have a house, you pay a lot of tax, but as a proportion of your income, you're probably paying 10% of your income on housing. Whereas someone who makes $50,000 a year is probably paying 30% of their income on housing and paying a higher tax rate. You think, well, they're probably renting. Be clear, high real estate taxes affect renters just as much as owners. So in some state sales tax for people like me is 1 to 2%. State sales taxes and consumption taxes are between 10 and 13% for lower and middle income households in Florida. Or put another way, the democracy, the D in democracy in Florida is working really well because old people vote and there's a lot of old people down here. And effectively what has happened is they have figured out a tax code to transfer wealth from low and middle income earners, which is most people you meet in Miami, to high-income old people who own a lot of [__]. So be clear, Florida is a proxy for what has happened in America in the last 30 or 40 years, and that is nothing but an elegant transfer of wealth from lower and middle-income households to the wealthy.
So the argument, the argument for it, which I actually think is quite a compelling one, and we should note it was compelling enough for you to come and buy a house here, which is that the lower taxes, as you mentioned, lower capital gains tax, no capital gains tax, no estate tax. It does attract a lot of very highly productive individuals, very wealthy individuals, and as a result you do find that in low tax states or no tax states you have higher GDP growth among those states and you also have more business formation. You actually have more business applications on average. So that seems to be kind of the argument for it. And I think sort of case in point, I mean we incorporated our business in Florida, if I had that correct. So that's a great thing. At the same time though, to your point, there is this other thing that to balance out, which is it's bringing in a lot of people, but it's specifically bringing in a lot of rich people. And as a result housing prices have exploded in Miami. We can look at the price, the average price of housing in Miami. It's up 80% in the past 6 years. The average is $675,000. It's the median price of a home in Miami today. 6 years ago it was $370,000. Rents have risen more than 50%, which is actually the fastest in the nation. And this is part of the problem with being the sexy hot place where you don't pay taxes is suddenly all these people come in. Suddenly the demand goes way up. There isn't enough supply to keep up with that demand. And it ultimately does seem to start pushing regular Americans out. And we are seeing that many more Floridians today are struggling with the cost of living crisis and they're saying that it's a reason why I might actually just leave the state and just call it quits. So how do you think, I mean wealth taxes, this is the debate today. What are we doing about taxes? Should they go up? Should they go down? How should we think about this? What do you think are some of the takeaways from Florida? Because there are a lot of good arguments as to how this has been a great thing for the state and to your point a lot of arguments as to why it hasn't been very good.
So just to be fair, states need to compete and the fact that people are leaving New York where I teach and coming to Florida, I think that's a good thing because what it says to New York is if you continue to have a wasteful and incompetent government, people are going to leave. That's important. It's important to say to California leaders that if you keep layers of bureaucracy and spend $75,000 per homeless person as the homeless population increases that people are going to leave and you need to get your act together. And to be fair, Florida government spends on average 10 to 15% less per capita than the rest of the nation. And I would argue that Florida, as someone who lives here, has pretty decent schools and decent state services. The only thing I would push back a little bit, and I'll get to your question around tax policy, is that so Jeff Bezos just moved here to spend more time with his father. What a guy. And so this goes to tax policy. What people are doing is they're leveraging the incredible infrastructure, schools, and culture of a place like California or Washington State where they build wealth and then piecing out in time to recognize a capital gain in a low tax state. Now, I get that that's their right, but that's not being competitive. That's not paying it forward or paying it back to the culture and to the schools that built that wealth. So, in terms of tax policy, just a couple things I think would help. One, you should be taxed on the income you make based on the state where you made it. If you made a lot of money leveraging the incredible University of California and the ecosystem in the Bay Area, then whenever you begin to recognize that capital gain, you should be charged on it. You shouldn't be able to peace out and then move to Florida and not pay taxes back to the state of California. And I personally think that what we have in the US, we're spending $7 trillion a year on $5 trillion in receipts. That is the biggest tax increase in history because what that means is at some point you're going to have to pay that back. Whether it's through higher interest rates or an inability to invest in education and infrastructure, you're just going to be, all of your taxes are going to go to interest rates. So for me, there's just a couple basic solves here. And the incumbents like to create this illusion of complexity that these are unfixable problems. You could fairly easily fix our deficit and our tax problem with a more equitable tax code with the following. One, an alternative minimum tax. If you're making over $10 million a year, I think we should go back to the 60s, 70s, and 80s of Reagan and you should pay an alternative minimum tax of 40 or 50, 60%. Because effectively you get no incremental happiness above a certain amount of money. What you want is taxes that are the least taxing possible. And there's a lot of research showing once you get to a certain level of wealth, you get no incremental happiness. So I'm all for Elon Musk making a trillion dollars. I just think he should give half of it back because if he only makes 500 billion, not a trillion, he's not any less or more happier. But five million households that have child tax credits, health care, that makes those households, those 5 million households much happier. And then the real solve for our deficit and to give you the same type of opportunities I had is we need to move away from this dynastic society we're building. We're building dynasties with nepo wealth. I joined every members club. I'm at that age where I'm finally trying to spend money. I spent 30 years trying to do nothing but make money. Now I just want to spend it.
I think I'm going to take a shot on members clubs. That's... That does it for me. Yeah.
