Name: Scott Galloway on America’s Credibility and Global Leadership
Uploaded: 2026-01-23
Duration: 11 min 40 s
Description: Scott Galloway joined Fortune’s Diane Brady at Davos for a frank conversation on how the mood of the World Economic Forum—and the global climate—has shifted since his last visit in 1999, reflecting a move away from optimism and cooperation toward uncertainty around America’s credibility and leadership.

Scott Galloway joined Fortune’s Diane Brady at Davos for a frank conversation on how the mood of the World Economic Forum—and the global climate—has shifted since his last visit in 1999, reflecting a move away from optimism and cooperation toward uncertainty around America’s credibility and leadership.

Scott Galloway on America’s Credibility and Global Leadership

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So let me bring up our guest tonight to set us all off. Scott Galloway, who has not been here in, I believe, 1999, was the last time he was here, and Scott and I met, um, I believe we were mentoring young people with Dick Fold, who knows the Dick Fold, the former Lehman Brothers, uh, at the stock exchange. With a very confident kid named Encore Jay, who now is a billionaire, and I don't know where Dick Fold is. Do you know where Dick Fold is? I have not seen Dick. OK, so there we've lost track of Dick, but, um, here we are today. What brings you to Davos, sir? Let's start with that. Uh, Larry Finn called me and said, I want you to come, and that's enough. That's all it takes. That's way more than enough. OK, very good. Well, give us your impressions. I know you've been doing some video. Let's start with that. It's been a while, 26 years, yeah, 27 years. So when I was here 27 years ago, I would describe it as, so Bill Clinton gave the speech of the day. That was what everyone was excited about, slightly different speech than the one we heard yesterday, uh. I would say the American brand or as I was an American entrepreneur. I was one of these guys, you know how you can't run into, can't go 10 ft without meeting someone who has an AI startup they're dying to tell you about. I was one of those guys pitching e-commerce startups back in '99. The biggest shift, so is the internet. The brand of America though, I sort of feel like this is a gathering to basically let Americans just boast and Europeans just politely listen. Um, the, Call sign of America back then was kind of consumerism. It's very consumption oriented. It was it was more cooperation, I would say alliances. And now transition 27 years later. My impression is now it's not the internet, it's AI. It's all AI, and the American brand is sort of Chaos, corruption, and. Coercion. Uh, I'm just incredibly fucking embarrassed as an American. Um, there's no getting around it, and. I feel as if, You know, we begin the week with this language around annexing a sovereign nation, an ally, which is Latin for invade. And tariffs And the market crashes, and then by the end of the week, invasion is taken off the table and the tariffs go away. And my question is, if you're running the largest economy in the world, and in 96 hours, you reverse decisions like that. What what does that do other than erode trust? And credibility just around the world and as someone who loves statistics and math. We're under the impression. Two of the four most valuable companies in the world, most valuable companies in '99 were Microsoft, Exxon General Electric, and Walmart. Now it's Saudi Aramco's in there. They're still an energy company, number 3. it is, um, Apple, Nvidia, Saudi Aramco, and Alphabet. So two of the four companies have an operating system. If you have the operating system the world lives on. You can just figure out all sorts of ways to monetize different applications that have to comply with your code. Essentially, America's been the operating system for the world since 1945, kind of our laws, our means of going about business. Has it changed, do you think? I mean, you were complimentary of Carney, for example, and taking a stance. Yeah, so we're 33% of the world's GDP and we were the operating system for 60 or 70%. And somehow we've decided that we can go at it alone with 33%, which just to me is nothing but. A pure self-inflicted injury of diminishing our own power. It's like it's, it's as if Android decided to kick 80% of their handsets off of the Android operating system. So I find the whole thing, and there's also the, I don't know if I'm getting older and more depressed, but it feels that there's just a sense of unease where in '99 we were like, we want more, whereas now it feels like we just hope things don't get worse. There's just a really unsettled feeling here and someone called me and said, what would you have done differently, someone from the European Union? And I said, someone should have got a hold of Mark Carney's speech, realized it was the best speech any of you were giving. And all 27 EU member states should have been sitting behind him. And you should have had a list of to do's. We're going to start selling treasuries as a unified group. We're going to have our own trade zone and just lay out these things sequentially, calmly and carefully. Right now, the EU, I mean, the reality is they're leaderless as a, as a result of pushing back on Trump. Who, who, who on earth represents the EU right now? I mean, raise your hand. Yeah, no, nobody in here. That's all good. It's like, you know, Germany and the 26 dwarves. It's just sort of and also the reality is. The reality is the economy here is just a wet blanket. Um, I was, I was at the Black Rock dinner last night, and one of the gentlemen there pointed out correctly, there was someone there who'd started a company 5 years ago that would be one of the 7 most valuable companies in Europe right now, anthropic. So, it, it's, It's just, um, I find it very, I leave here exceptionally unsettled is, and I, I, you wanna be optimistic, but I find all of this very, um, quite frankly embarrassing as an American and unsettling as someone who thinks about their kids and stability and. And taking for granted how much peace and prosperity we've had the last 80 years. So what advice do you have? I don't know if you caught Elon Musk's speech. What do you say better to be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right, which I disagree with, but What advice do you have? I mean, obviously I know you've just for this room full of leaders. I know you talk a lot about AI, and we've talked a lot, you know, the whole Lost Generation Gen Z. There's been a lot of attention on that here at Davos, right? So I'll come back and you feel like a woman too. You mentioned that in your video, so thank you for that. Yeah, I won't say why because it was crude. Um, everyone, everyone, when, whenever a bunch of mammals get together, there's a hierarchy. I don't care if you're sniffing each other's butts or looking at your badge, but I feel like a woman, and that is people look at my eyes and then they look at my chest to see my badge, um. That's why I'm not wearing my badge, I guess, yeah. Yeah. I, I thought that'd be fun. It is on the record. There you go. Sorry, yeah, go ahead. So look, uh. If I were a business leader, I feel like, I feel like the EU is leaderless and pushing back on some of these uh ideas breaking apart, the greatest alliance in history, and I feel like US leaders, US corporations are leaderless. If you go back to the early 30s in Germany. The darkness all started with Hitler creating informal alliances with corporations and basically said, if you support me or stay quiet, I'll get rid of the unionists. And the corporations decided that shareholder value is why we're here, and they made these deals with Hitler. And I feel like the silence, I'm going to list, so the Fortune 500. There are a lot of great Americans, a lot of people who wake up in the morning and say, hello, Mr. President, when they look in the mirror who think they should be leaders, and I'm, I'm on to do list of Fortune 500 leaders who have, who have pushed back on what is an irrational and sometimes weird and cruel policy of the administration. OK, done. So, uh, the problem is if anyone, if anyone goes first, they're punished. So it strikes me that we need a leader, a corporate leader in the United States who calls people on the lowdown and says, unless 50 of us come out at the same time. We can't do it, so I feel like people who consider themselves leaders are showing a striking lack of leadership and aren't familiar with the history in Europe around the role that corporations played in the lead up to an incredibly dark period in Europe. AI, the thing I'm worried about, we were talking about this before. I'm an AI optimist. I think it's going to create more jobs than it destroys. I've never bought into the notion. If you look at every technology in history, short term job destruction, but over the medium and the long term, it creates jobs. I don't see any reason why this would be any different. The V might be deeper this time, but I find a lot of my colleagues, we sound smarter when we catastrophize. So, you know, 90% unemployment. I, I just don't think that's true. And so far we haven't really seen it. There'll be certain pockets that are hurt more than others. I was an investment banking analyst. I imagine that job's going to get, we won't need as many of them. But The thing I'm most worried about is um synthetic relationships, and that is character AI. And uh I'm sort of a hammer. I, my focus is, or my big issue is, uh, young men in America and the West. No cohort has fallen further faster than young men. They're 4 times as likely to be addicted, 3 times as likely, excuse me, 3 times as likely to be addicted, 4 times as likely to kill themselves. If you go into a morgue in the United States and there's 5 people died by suicide, 4 men. Um, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated. 1 in 3 men under the age of 25 are still living at home. 1 in 3 men at the age of 30 are still living at home. Only 1 in 3 men are in a relationship, whereas 2 in 3 women under the age of 30 are in a relationship, you think, well, that's mathematically impossible. It's not because women are dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. Trus, it's true. That's, and on a note of hope in the last, no, I'm just kidding, um, but it's got about a minute, in a minute, and limerick, whatever you want. Well, how do you, what anything else you want to lead this group with? Uh, what gives you hope? What gives you joy, Scott Galloway? How about that? What gives you joy? I hate my life less and less every day. No, but you're, I mean, you like your, you love your job. There's, what gives me joy? Do. OK, good. Oh, OK, you want, you want to end on a cheery note here? No, I do not want. I want to end on a you note. I don't know there's you. Well, first off, in terms of the markets, let's be clear, the, uh, the optimists have won. Right? I said Tesla was vastly overvalued 10 years ago or 8 years ago. Elon started calling me names on the internet, and he won. His stock's up 700%. By the way, the most overvalued company in the world right now, with the exception of Palantir. Um, but the optimists have won the last 10 years. That's the bottom line. So I think it's always healthy to ask what could go right. I always ask myself what could go right because I tend to see the glass is half full, but the most encouraging statistic or piece of data in the world right now is they've begun tracking the amount of time that people spend. Helping people either through volunteer work or financial contributions that they will never meet, right? That number is at an all-time high. So there's more people globally planting trees the shade of which they'll never sit under. So that's a reason to be optimistic. Um-hum. Great. Please join me in thanking Scott Galloway. Thank you.