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Prices and participation may vary. Prices may delivery. Welcome to Office Hours with Prof. G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehoursofgmedia.com Again, that's officehoursofproftgmedia.com or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit and we just might feature it in our next episode.

Listener/Caller (1:26)

Question number one hi Scott, this is Pat from Boston. You talk a lot about how there's a greater concentration of wealth among retiring age Americans than at any other point in history. As someone who's both a well off and a father who will presumably leave an inheritance to his children, what's your thought on the current estate tax given as a $15 million lifetime exemption? 30 million if you're married. Do you think that a more aggressive estate tax is healthy for a meritocracy? And secondly, do you think that given we're about to experience the greatest generational wealth transfer in history, we're currently in a unique opportunity to attack the federal deficit by taxing that transfer. Thank you.

Scott Galloway (2:06)

Thanks for the question. Pat from Boston. It sounds like we're brothers from another mother. Look, what do we know? We know that we are recklessly spending money. We're spending $7 trillion a year on 5 trillion in receipts. That is our government spends 7 trillion and collects 5 trillion. That's not sustainable leads to massive money printing inflation, and at some point someone has to pay that money back or it crowds out other investments in technology and education that have a greater ROI because we're busy sending so much money to seniors who keep electing other seniors to vote themselves more money. So just some data. The one big beautiful bill signed July of 2025, made the estate tax exemption permanent. $15 million per person, $30 million per couple. The bill's estate tax expansion is estimated to add $212 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years. Oh yeah, more deficits. The estate tax currently hits fewer than 1 in 1,000 estates and raises only around 37 billion a year against a $36 trillion national debt. In sum, estate taxes are meaningless now because of that exemption and the fact that you can put money in and it grows well beyond that 30 million exemption. Research from Wharton estimates the tax would have generated nine times more revenue under the 2000 era tax code. Still roughly 85 billion versus the actual 9 billion baby boomers in the silent generation are set to transfer. God, I thought it was 50 trillion. It's not. It's 84 trillion by 24. Oh my God, think about that. In the next 20 years, 19 years, $84 trillion is going to be transferred. The largest intergenerational wealth transfer in the history of the planet. Of that 73 trillion goes directly to heirs. And the wealthiest one and a half percent of households account for 42%, almost half of expected transfers. So again, small number of people taking the greatest advantage of this tax loophole and the ones who need it the least, quite frankly. Americans 70 plus currently control more than 30% of all U.S. wealth, according to Fed data. And wealthier boomers are more than two times as likely to leave inheritances as poor Americans. Meaning the transfer entrenches inequality rather than resets it. So again, see above dynastic wealth. So that's where we are. So the key is with taxes, is to try and find taxes that are the least taxing. And the idea of a progressive tax structure is that the wealthy, if they lose 40, 50, 60% of their income, it doesn't really impact their lives. Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli American psychologist, has written a ton on this and done great research and said that above a certain amount of money, the happiness is really incremental. And that is once you're making 3, 4, 500,000, or if you're in New York, a million or 2 million bucks and can afford to have kids and absorb an economic shock, have good healthcare, and by the way, it's not a lot of money. Above that, no real incremental happiness. Which leads me to believe that, okay, if you're getting no incremental happiness. You're making 15 million versus 10 million a year. And the difference between universal childcare in a household and no universal childcare in a household, which is an incremental 10 or 15 grand in government services for that household, is enormous. Then it just strikes me that we should have fairly aggressive progressive tax structure. Now, the problem is, once you become a super owner and stop making a lot of money, but making money from investments, you can defer all of your taxes. So this is kind of how billionaires work. They start companies, they own stocks, they never sell those stocks, they borrow against them, never triggering a tax liability. So if you think of yourself as a stock and you make $100,000 every year, every year that a hundred thousand dollars is taxed at 30%. And even though you're gaining 70,000 a year, instead of gaining 100,000, if you own stocks that were increasing $100,000 a year, they compound. And in 10 years you have triple the amount of money on the tax deferred ownership basis versus the earnings. Now, some people never make enough money to save enough money to become owners. But that's the key when you're young is to find something you're focused on or focus on something, live modestly and start building that base such that you can transition from an earner to owner. That's a whole shooting match is not earning millions of dollars. It's transitioning from earner to owner because of the tax policy. Now the problem is when you can transfer ownership to new generations and you never tax that money. That is probably the greatest tax loophole. In sum, how do we raise revenues, increase taxes that are the least taxing? And I think you've zeroed in on it. One, I would have an AMT the tax code's gone from 400 pages to 4,000. And all of those goodies are basically there to protect special interest groups. C above corporations and the rich. And there's all sorts of tax loopholes. The tax is not the tax rates that kill us, it's tax loopholes. There's five Fortune 100 companies that pay no taxes. The average tax rate for the top 0.1% is, you know, single or low double digits. I paid a much greater my ratio of my salary when I was making hundreds of thousands. And now that I've been fortunate enough to make millions, some years I pay a lower tax rates because see above, I'm an owner now, not an earner. Okay, so AMT tax on corporations, say, okay, take all your Loopholes. But if you're not paying 30% of your income in taxes and you make over a million bucks, boom, an AMT kicks in and you pay that 30%. But what you're talking about is lowering the threshold on estate taxes. Generally speaking, in line with the American zeitgeist, is that we don't build dynasties. And we've always traditionally had a pretty high estate tax because the idea is we want to invest in infrastructure, whether it's the Internet or medical research or education or childcare. That creates opportunities for the next generation of people who demonstrate grit and hard work. And that you shouldn't just inherit wealth. We don't want to be like Europe and have dynastic wealth. So I personally would lower the estate tax exemption to a million dollars because of the $50 trillion in wealth. Do you know how much was paid in estate tax last year? 20 billion. So what is that less than, I don't know, 0.2% or something? I mean, basically not even that. What is that, 20 billion? 52,500. So it's 0.04%. Jesus. Anyways, my math is getting wrong here. 0.4%. Anyways. I don't know. I don't know. I did a lot of drugs in college and used to be very good at math. And now that part of my brain is just dying, along with calendars or ability to remember people's names. Anyways, I would absolutely pretty much go to 1 million from 30 million for estate taxes. And not only that, that number is misleading. Because if I put something, a stock into my state and it goes from being worth a million to 7 million, say when I pass away in 40 years, it's not a 30 million tax exemption that it's priced at that 1 million. So technically that $30 million exemption could grow to be hundreds of millions or even billions that doesn't get taxed. And what do you want? You want a tax that doesn't decrease people's happiness. And if your kid inherits a million bucks or more and they lose 40% of it, say at 10 million, instead of inheriting all 10 million, they inherit six or seven. It's not in any way going to change their life or their happiness. So I love the idea of lowering the exemption from 30 million for a married couple or 15 million from single to a million. Sure, you've worked. You want to be able to pass along a decent amount of money tax free. I get it. But above a certain amount, we need you to reinvest in the great things that made you rich to begin with such that other future generations can be can live up to what is truly an American dynamic. And that is have the infrastructure and investments and wind in their sails such that if they demonstrate some grit and character and register some luck, they too, like you can have a bunch of money. But I'm writing a book on public policies or kind of ideas on how to increase the health and prosperity of America and one of my kind of I think no brainer ideas is to pretty much do away or dramatically lower the exemption on estate taxation. Very much appreciate the question. Question number two comes from a listener who emailed us. Hi Scott, I'm a 28 year old veteran from Minneapolis currently transitioning from active duty into marketing. You've mentioned your interest in data from prediction markets, including Cal State to gauge your wisdom of crowds. I'm curious how you think young professionals might leverage this type of data to strengthen the storytelling in their work? Are there any industries or use cases where you think this approach could be especially impactful going forward? Okay, so just so I love the data from prediction markets. We use it here at Propg all the time. Kalshee secured exclusive deals with CNN and CNBC this year within 48 hours of each other alongside closing a $1 billion funding round. CNN deal is exclusive. It says that they won't work with any other prediction market. CNN pays zero licensing fees. Polymarket struck a deal with Dow Jones in January 2026 for their data to be displayed across debut Wall Street Journal, Barron's, marketwatch and Investors Business Daily, including in print. Polymarket data was also integrated into the Bloomberg Terminal in 2024, the first signal that Wall street was taking prediction markets seriously. And polymarket also has deals with X, Yahoo Finance and Substack. Okay, so what's going on here? Why is this data so powerful? There is a phenomena called the wisdom of crowds that if you ask one person to make a bunch of predictions across different subject material and then you ask a hundred people their prediction and you take the prediction that is most prevalent among those hundred, the wisdom or the crowd will beat the individual almost every time. So there's a wisdom of crowds and that is it balances out all emotion, super smart, not super smart, biases, et cetera. So I find this data is absolutely just powerful and insightful. And if you look at the elections, the prediction markets have gotten have gotten elections correct more often than any pollster. As a matter of fact, CalSHI has predicted Fed rate cut decisions correctly 100% of the time and that is the Crowd on Kalshi has predicted what is going to happen with respect to Fed interest rates and the amount of that cut or not cut. Its track record is 100% right now. So I think that looking at this data, using it as just another data stream, is really powerful and just to incorporate into your own analysis. I don't see it as I'm trying to think, is there specific businesses based on the data? Probably. But I would just think of it as another data source. And when you go into a meeting where you're, you know, you're talking about an issue that might be impacted by an issue, I think it's interesting to go to one of these markets and see if a market has been started and what the market or the crowds are saying about the likelihood of something happening or not happening and incorporate that into your data set. And some I just think of it as another arrow in your tool set. It's also just interesting to go on to these platforms and just look at the data set and see how things are forming and how things are going up or going down. What it thinks oil is going to do, what it thinks the Fed's going to do, what it thinks earnings are going to do. I personally would be careful not to engage in this type of gambling, personally, especially if you're a younger man who's more prone to this type of addiction. But using it as a data source, gosh, I think it's powerful and I use it every day. So again, it's just another tool, another data set. Get facile with it, Find out if you're in an industry where there's a lot of markets being formed, providing predictions, then check on them and incorporate them as a data set. A second order thought here might be, could you potentially use it as some sort of interesting insurance market? That's a little esoteric and generic, but the idea is that there might be. So in Florida, it's near impossible now to get hurricane insurance. So the feeling is there might be markets started where they make bets that a hurricane will hit and that you make the insurance market invest a small amount of money that the hurricane will hit, and if it does, it pays off. And that's the equivalent of insurance because maybe you incurred damage from that hurricane. I think there's a lot of different applications for how this might be used to ensure or hedge certain bets. If you're worried that the market's going to go down because Trump is elected, then maybe you bet on Trump being elected, and if he is, that hedges what you think might be downside, risk, you know, in your stocks or what have you. So that's probably pretty esoteric and for specific industries, but I think it's just a way. I think it's an interesting way to think about, you know, how you use different types of markets. Anyways, thanks for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from aws. How much of your workday is actually work versus just hunting for information? The answer you need is buried in a Slack thread. The data is in Salesforce or in an email from two weeks ago. By the time you've pulled it all together, half your morning is gone. That's the problem Amazon QUIC was built to solve. 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