The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:00:00 · Scott Galloway, Scott Galloway, S2
[00:00:00] S0: Support for the show comes from First Citizens Innovation Banking, formerly Silicon Valley Bank. First Citizens is the bank of the innovation economy. The name may have changed, but for over forty years, their commitment to bold ideas, relentless ambition, and delivering what's next is as strong as ever. So if you're wondering where the road to innovation starts, it's here. First Citizens Innovation Banking. Head to firstcitizens.com/innovation to learn more. [00:00:28] S1: Great meeting. Who took notes? Anyone? [00:00:32] S2: With Monday Notetaker, the meeting ends and the plan already exists. Action items, owners, deadlines. Go to monday.com, the AI workspace platform. [00:00:44] S0: Support for the show comes from Yahoo Scout. Whatever you're searching for, Yahoo Scout can turn hours of research into clear, trustworthy answers in seconds, keeping up with culture and navigating the ups and downs of parenting, planning a vacation, and more. Make sense of life's everyday questions and personal decisions with Yahoo Scout. Yahoo's personal finance page has been my homepage for about thirty years. And so far, I find the user interface from Yahoo Scout really elegant, and I find the results to be really helpful, quite frankly. Go to scout.com to start exploring today.
00:01:25 · Scott Galloway
[00:01:25] S1: Welcome to Office Hours with Prof G, where we answer questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. Have a question? Send us a voice recording at officehours@propgmedia.com, or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit. We just might feature it in an upcoming episode. Question number one comes from Tim who emailed us. Scott, I'm reaching out as a father trying to figure out how to have an important conversation with my 18 year old son. He just joined fraternity at Florida State last week. He's at an age where independence, belonging, and finding his place in the world are incredibly important. The recent situation at Cornell has me thinking about what it means to be a young man entering a fraternity life today. You've spoken extensively about young men, masculinity, loneliness, and importance of male relationships. I generally value your perspective on how to approach this. If you were me, what would you say to your son right now? More than anything, I want my son to become a man who has the confidence to do the right thing even when doing so might cost him socially. Thanks for all the work you do, Tim. Oh, God. This cannot be more relevant. I'm not exaggerating. So I have a freshman at UVA who likely will join a fraternity in the spring. Something I think that is smart that UVA does is that they don't let you rush until spring. I rushed, I was 17 when I rushed to fraternity. I did it because I wanted to move out of my mom's and I just went up and down fraternity row asking if they had live ins. And what that means, you can live in the house. And I moved into, I got into UCLA seven days before school started. I got off, I got appealed and got in. And then two days after school started, I moved into the fraternity and lived in a room, you know, growing up as an only child and moved in with three other guys. And then over the course of the years, I became involved in the fraternity system and was actually IFC or inter fraternity counsel, the governing body of the fraternity's president. And I absolutely love being in a fraternity. Some of my closest friends yesterday, I'm in LA, I hung out with a buddy of mine. I have probably eight really close friends from from the fraternity. And I don't think I would have graduated from UCLA had I not been for the fraternity.
00:03:25 · Scott Galloway, Scott Galloway
So let me me start off with, I think that fraternities or any group that shrinks a university down from the 20,000 undergrads it is UCLA and helps you find your people, whether it's the Asian Society, Black Students Alliance, whatever it might be, dance club, choir, anything that finds you. You got to find your people at a place like UCLA. Otherwise it's just a sea of you're just going to school in a city and don't have any friends and you're young. And there's data to show that there's some very positives. You're more likely to graduate once you join a fraternity or sorority. [00:03:54] S0: You get higher grades
00:03:55 · Scott Galloway
[00:03:55] S1: or better grades, more likely to be involved in the school after you get out. There's some real big problems. I just read a study saying that men in fraternities are twice as likely to be the perpetrators of sexual violence. And then some of the data in the study shows that maybe that that type of person is predisposed to joining a fraternity, but just some of it they're entitled. I don't know. You also have, I think probably more alcohol and substance abuse. Although I haven't seen the studies there, but I've been thinking a lot about Cornell and what to say to my son. When I was an Interfraternity Council President, I saw all of the kind of really bad shit happen, because you'd have to correspond with UCPD, the administration, and occasionally the parents, which was the most upsetting part of all of this. What I mostly saw, and I was thinking about this the other day, I saw deaths of despair, suicide and deaths of drunkenness. A kid fell off the balcony at the SAE rush party and you know crushed his head and died. Before presents a woman ate rat poison. A guy who was my second vice president at The Interfraternity Council asked a woman to marry him in his senior year. The word is she said no, and he went back to the fraternity and he hung himself. Another friend at the Fycab House was at a party, got fucked up, took out a jet ski at night, and washed up eight days later. Again, another death of drunkenness. I didn't hear a lot about sexual assault. And that's not to say that it wasn't happening, but it was either being dealt with in channels that I wasn't privy to, or it was being swept under the rug quite frankly. So the events of Cornell and having a kid at college, most of my conversations to date have been, look, you need to modulate and understand that you're at an age where your body hasn't adapted to alcohol and you don't know your limits, and that there'll be peer pressure to drink. My pledge pinning, I tell them the story of my pledge pinning. You're so excited. I'm 17. You get into the fraternity and every... All these cool older guys are saying drink, drink, drink. And they gave us all a bottle of Andre pink champagne. And we down this bottle and then all of us were soon throwing up. And there was a kid next to me whose eyes were rolling back at his head. He was so drunk, was basically unconscious.
00:06:15 · Scott Galloway, Scott Galloway
And one guy said, well, let's just let him sleep it off, put him in, you know, one of these rooms. And another guy stepped [00:06:23] S0: in and said, no, we need to take him
00:06:24 · Scott Galloway
[00:06:24] S1: to the emergency room. When he got to the emergency room, he was breathing six times a minute. And they said, had we put him to bed, he would have never woken up. He would have had he would have drunk his last breath. So my first message to my son was, you know, you've just gotta know your limits around alcohol. And when you fill your truck, you just gotta stop and you gotta move to water. And no one's, I don't believe, gonna not let you into the fraternity because you refused to drink more and said, don't feel well. I think my son has actually a really healthy relationship with alcohol. And in England, they're just a couple years behind. And that is, it's weird while they can start drinking at 17 with a parent, I think that's a good idea because he just sort of has a beer every once in a while, doesn't really get drunk, doesn't, as far as I know, abuse alcohol. And I think it's sort of slowly but surely kind of eased into alcohol and learned his limits sooner than maybe a lot of kids in America who aren't supposed to be drinking. Then the first time is away at college or they turn 21 and they go crazy. So I've actually found that my boys so far, as far as I know, have a really healthy relationship and that is they have eased into kind of social drinking. And I think that's healthy. And I have found that the approach to drinking in The EU, despite it starting earlier, I would describe as healthier because they kind of just ease into it. Whereas the notion that kids aren't going to drink under the age of 21 is ridiculous. And I find that kids have a tendency to go from zero to 60 much faster in The US. I had not drank in high school and in a weird way I think that was sort of bad and that is when I showed up with all this alcohol, I was in the emergency room and I think this is my second week at college. Not because I got too drunk, I did get drunk and I felt faint. And I ran outside and I tripped and I hit a wall and they decided, you know, see above someone almost died. So they immediately took me to the emergency room where I had two stitches. And the worst part about that experience is I had to send a $320 bill to my dad, who is not loose with the money, not splashing the cash around. And that was an uncomfortable conversation.