Talking to a Radicalized Parent, How AI Will Disrupt Higher Ed, and Sending Your Kid Off to School

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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.

Just a reminder, you can now catch office hours every Monday and Friday.

That's two episodes a week.

If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehours at profitmedia.com.

Again, that's officehours at profitmedia.com.

Or post your question on the Scott Gallery subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode.

First question.

Our first question comes from Snarky Spice on Reddit.

They ask,

hey, Scott, my dad and I have always been really close.

He recently discovered YouTube for the first time and is actually the one who turned me on to your podcast.

We even met you at TED.

Oh, that's nice.

Over time, though, he stopped listening to your pod or any others and has been hooked on the all-in podcast.

My dad is a lifelong liberal, a philanthropist, and very caring person, but since listening to that podcast, he's been shocked by some of the things he started saying, Russian talking points and whatnot.

It feels like his worldview is changing, and it has been painful to watch.

As a daughter, how can I respectfully talk to him about the dangers of that kind of media influence without sounding condescending or pushing him further away.

And as a father of sons, how do you go about talking to them about media literacy?

Thanks for all you do, Amy.

I can't speak specifically to the Allen Pot.

I've never listened to it.

I know they have a following.

I know that all of them are very successful.

And then the podcast moderator, who's, I forget his name, is less successful, but

and they've gone, my understanding is from everything here is they've gone totally red pill.

But that's, that's their right.

And that's kind of your dad's right.

I would say that trying to browbeat your dad, my son popped up the other day.

I mean, you are where you spend your time, unfortunately.

And my son, I remember on my way to get, our way to get sushi, my 13-year-old or then 13-year-old son said, dad, when did they take their land away?

And he was obviously referring to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

And immediately I wanted to go, well, that's not actually accurate.

But the fastest way, I think, to get your family members to sort of seize up or cement their views or their weird views is to come at them.

And what I would suggest is what I've said to my son is I just started asking more about it.

And then my older son a few years ago was talking about Andrew Tate and he didn't say he specifically liked him, but he was sort of defending him.

And I said, what is it about Andrew Tate that appeals to people your age?

And

what do you like or not like about him?

And what attributes do you think are positive or negative?

I just ask a series of questions and try and get them to their own conclusions.

With respect to your dad, I think just having civil conversations around their views or what have you, that hurts losing people to the all-red pill podcast.

Yeah, I don't think there's a whole hell of a lot you can do.

And I think it might be a learning experience for you.

Ask him to listen to a pod you like, you listen to a pod he likes, and then discuss it.

And,

but yeah, I have heard that those guys are basically Sergei Lavarov and kind of parroting Russian talking points.

But look, that's that's your dad's right, that's their right, and

I would suggest you just try and engage them with other content.

But I can tell you what doesn't work as,

you know, a dad is coming at someone angry or in an obstinate, I think from the left, we're especially bad at that, lecturing people and asking them to sign up for an orthodoxy and focusing on social virtue instead of what actually impacts the material and psychological well-being of actual Americans.

I think the Democrats are just awful at that.

So I would just engage them in conversation.

Try and separate the person from the politics a little bit.

I don't, I just don't even talk to my father-in-law about politics.

I don't need to hear why he thinks Trump is great.

I just, I don't want to dislike the man and I would end up disliking him.

And where I live or I have a home in Florida, I would say a good 40, maybe even 50% of my friends are Trump supporters.

And

I have one friend that I've grew up with, my whole, I mean, a really close friend who's like gone total fucking red pill.

He puts out these videos every day, like calling Governor Newsome, Governor Newscum, and talking about,

you know, that Biden should have been arrested.

And I'm like, Jesus Christ, this guy has literally lost his shit.

But I just ignore it all because I value the friendship.

And if you don't separate the person from the politics, you're going to lose 50% of your relationships.

And one of the terrible things about how polarized we've become and quite frankly, just how what a fucking narcissist Trump is and how he needs to be in the news every day, even if it's deploying the National Guard for no reason, in my view.

That's just not helping.

And, but what I would say is, try not to give into it and inject politics into your relationships because you kind of immediately sequester yourself from 50% of the population.

Anyways, long-winded way of saying, try and separate the person from the politics.

Engage your dad in discussions around this stuff.

But I wouldn't, I'd be very careful not to lecture at him.

And at the end of the day, he's a grown man.

He gets to make his own decisions around this stuff.

Thanks for the question.

Our second question comes from KCBH711.

They say,

hey, Prop G, you said college is overpriced and outdated.

How does AI fit into the future of higher education?

Do you think it is a final nail in the coffin or a way to reinvent it?

Yeah, it's overpriced, but the problem is it's still the ticket for a lot of people.

I continue to hear adults at parties whisper, oh, they don't need.

You know, our kids aren't going to need college anymore.

Meanwhile, they're paying college consultants $30,000 to try and get their kids into brown.

These people are so full of shit.

Oh, it doesn't matter.

You don't need college.

It's because they're worried little Bobby is not going to get into a good school.

So the lie we tell ourselves is that people don't need college anymore.

Yeah, a lot of people, two-thirds of young kids are not going to get a traditional liberal arts education, but it still is a great,

I don't know, great on-ramp into a better life.

There's just no getting around it.

I think you're going to make on average double.

A college grad is going to make double what someone with a high school degree only is going to make.

And someone from an elite college, it's even,

I think it's even more dramatic.

So this bullshit around people don't need college anymore is a lie we tell ourselves when our kids don't end up with the opportunity or the desire to go to college.

And I want to be clear, it's not for everybody.

There's a lot of great jobs in the real economy.

I donate a lot of money to vocational programming for young adults because the real economy has a lot of interesting jobs out there in the trades that you started 60, 70, 80, 100.

You're making 100 grand a year by the time you're 25, installing energy efficient HVAC or repairing EVs or, God, I can't imagine how much money they're going to pay you if you get the skills to be on specialty construction for a nuclear power plant.

Anyway, there's a lot of opportunities, non-college opportunities, but I think that the best thing, one of the best things we could do in terms of reform for college is one, revoke the tax status or tax-free status of

universities that have over a billion dollars in endowment if they don't expand their freshman class faster than population growth.

This artificial scarcity bullshit mindset is really creating a lot of manufactured stress among America's middle class.

I got into UCLA when they had a 76% admissions rate.

I was one of the 24% that was rejected initially, and then I appealed and I got in.

And this year, the acceptance rate is 9%.

So if you don't expand your freshman class faster than population growth, you're no longer a public servant.

You're a Chanel bag, you lose your tax-free status.

Schools should be on the hook for 10%, 20%, 50% of bad debt, such that they stop doling out a shit ton of cheap credit to kids who they know are not going to be able to pay it back.

So, your question about AI, I think AI will help people learn faster and will up the bar, but I don't think it's going to replace creativity, strategy.

You know, I think it might hurt salaries.

So, investment banking and consulting are going to dramatically reduce their hiring because the initial entry-level people are basically doing the work that AI can do, or AI can do the work that they can do right now.

But the top bankers, the top consultants are able to sit down with people and kind of emphasize the right points and sort of understand,

can kind of see the matrix, if you will, of a company and have the credibility to say to the CEO, no, this is a stupid idea.

You should be doing this.

So I think it's going to enhance education, make it more efficient, but I don't see it replacing education because at the end of the day, what we do at NYU or other schools, we don't educate, we certify.

And that is the real value add in the reason people pay our students $212,000 and the reason why kids pay us $300,000 in tuition over four years is that what we're doing is we're certifying.

The admissions process is so arduous.

We do credit checks.

Above, I said it's so fucking exclusionary and rejectionist.

We do interviews.

It's basically the higher ed is the outsourced HR department for the corporate world.

And that is we make sure the kids aren't mentally ill.

We make sure the kids can play with others.

The kids have to do group projects.

The kids at NYU have to go to Barcelona for the semester and show that they can survive without their parents.

You know, that they can do basic math, that they can show up for class wearing shoes.

You know, just all this shit that basically says, all right, this is an adult that will succeed in the corporate world.

And so the corporate world is willing to pay a 40%, 50%, 60% premium because of the incredible screening we've done.

And some higher ed's primary value add has already happened by orientation.

Whew, that was a mouthful.

Thanks for the question.

We'll be right back after a quick break.

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Welcome back.

Our final question also comes from Reddit, Mango279.

Mango279, Jesus Christ.

Prof G, how are you feeling about your son leaving for college soon?

It's tough.

It's very strange.

On the one hand,

My purpose for the first 40 years of my life was trying to get rich and so I could take care of myself, my mother, and be a baller.

That was my purpose.

I'm not proud of that, but that's that's the honest truth.

My purpose the last 10 years, 15 years is I want to raise good men.

And

no matter where I am in the world, the same time I call my kids,

I spend a ton of garbage time or just like nonchalant time with my kids.

My kids are at the point where they're kind of like, I don't want to say they're sick of hanging out with me, but I'm kind of always pretty available to them.

And I think they'll remember that when they're older.

I think they'll remember what an effort I made.

And I try also really hard to model good behavior.

And sometimes I fail, I get angry a lot.

Or,

you know, I have to remember I'm their dad, not their friend.

I had this image that we would be great buddies and they'd be really into World War II history and CrossFit.

And what you find out is if you want to be a good dad, one, you're not their friend, you're their dad.

You got to do the hard work early on.

You got to have the hard conversations.

You got to say, this is unacceptable.

No, you're not going out with your friends tonight because you were disrespectful to your mother.

You know, you got to do the hard work.

And some, you have to be an asshole such that they don't grow up to be huge assholes.

So that is my purpose is trying to to be a good dad.

But I still feel this kind of

this

weirdness, sadness,

and

not failure, but I always had this image that I would do all these amazing things with my kid that would be so

instructional, so

so many life lessons.

And I feel like I kind of never got there.

Like I wanted to, I wanted to build something with my kids, you know, renovate a car, or I wanted to have kind of these weekly things with my kids where we went over our family history, or I wanted to have a kindness practice, or, you know, and I feel like the most I've done is I managed to get through all eight seasons of Game of Thrones with them.

You know, it's just, I felt like, I know I'm a good dad, but I felt like I really wanted to be a great dad and I just never quite got there.

And now it's too late.

Now my boys are just into their own things and their own friends.

And I've missed my window of opportunity to kind of be the great dad that I was wanting to be.

So, I feel a little bit of like

shame's not the wrong word, but disappointment that I spent so much time virtue signaling and talking about being a dad.

And I feel like I know I'm a good dad, but I feel like I missed the opportunity to be a great dad and now it's too late.

So, I have that kind of pit of sadness.

And I don't know how much of that is on a self-reflection or just the fact that I'm prone to depression and see everything as a glass half empty.

I'm excited about the idea of trying to get my kids to launch to have my oldest leave the house healthy, happy.

You know, I've got him working out.

I know he likes himself.

I know he feels loved, but I want to get my kids to launch.

That's my purpose.

I want my kids to go into the world secure, happy, like themselves, find interesting things, add value, love their country, find a mate.

And I think we're tracking to get them to launch.

So that feels good.

The really hard part is

I got talked into boarding school for my oldest.

I think it's been really good for him.

It's kind of been a fucking disaster for me.

I really hate not having my sons in the same house with me.

I have my youngest, but I don't have my oldest.

And even if I didn't see him that day, just knowing he was upstairs, just hearing him around, hearing him on the phone, gave me a lot of comfort.

And I feel as if I'm always a little bit lost

when I'm home and both my sons aren't home.

He comes home.

It was sold to me that he would be home all weekend.

He's not.

He's home Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon.

It was the right thing to do.

He's a bit of a, not a loner, but he's very confident and he loves boarding school and he's doing really well.

He's thriving.

I can see him kind of evolving into a man.

So it was the right decision for him, but I don't know.

So it was the right, I should stop there.

It was the right decision.

But the idea, one of the reasons we're moving back to the U.S., one, I'm so fucking freaked out about this slow burn into fascism.

I want to be back on the ground.

But two, it looks as if my oldest is going going to go to college in the U.S.

and I don't want to be more than a kind of a two-hour plane ride.

I mean, talking about the dog wagon, the

tail here, I'm literally reconfiguring my life, not reconfiguring my life, but wherever I end up living, it'll be somewhere that's close enough such that my son can come home the weekend should he desire to.

But yeah, I'm sad about it.

Is sad the wrong word?

A mix of pride, a mix of melancholy.

I mean, I can't tell you.

It was literally just yesterday.

My son would come come in and like crawl into bed with me and then pop up and say, Dad, let's make a plan.

And then all of a sudden, he was this like tall, gangly 17-year-old, you know, who is nice to me, but is, you know, definitely not that impressed with me and definitely doesn't want to make a plan for the day with me.

I don't know where it went.

It just goes, you know, they say this, it goes so fast.

It goes so crazy fast.

So, yeah, I'm a little bit, I'm, I feel good about his leaving the nest and he's doing well, but there's just no getting around it.

I'm really sad that this is it.

And I know that 90% of the time I've spent with my kids, or my oldest has already happened.

So

yeah, I'm sad that my son is leaving for college.

That's all for this episode.

If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehours at propgmedia.com.

That's officehours at propgmedia.com.

Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in an upcoming episode.

This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez.

Drew Burroughs is our technical director.

Thank you for listening to the props you pop from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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