The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:19:14 · David Brooks, Scott Galloway
[00:19:14] S2: Yeah. I'm a Chicago guy. [00:19:15] S0: Yeah. Okay. In the middle of the tour, I just did that college week, college tour with my son. And they keep talking in this very, like, warm tones if we look at the full applicant. And then along the way, a parent. And, of course, it's only the parents asking questions. But But I think they should pass a law that no parent is ever allowed to ask a question in these tours. Anyways, someone makes the mistake of asking the admissions rate. And the guy, this lovely high EQ guy goes, it's 4%. So there's 75 people on this tour, 25 kids, 50 parents. So one of them is getting in, and we're all marching around the campus. And I say to my son, I said, let's let's leave the tour. I I just don't wanna get your hopes up here. You're not getting into the University of Chicago with a 4% admissions rate. You're just not. And I wonder if some of these schools should lose their tax free status that if you have if you have an endowment over a billion dollars, you're not growing your freshman class faster than population. You're no longer a public servant. You're a hedge fund with classes. What... You're a thoughtful guy. You've written on the topic. What do you think we do to try and break the caste system that has become higher education? [00:20:20] S2: You know, first, on those college tours, I've never felt more invisible in my life than when I'm a parent on one of those college tours because you realize you don't matter at all. But I would say these schools, and I piss on them all the time, they're still fantastic places.
00:20:20 · David Brooks, Scott Galloway
[00:20:20] S2: You know, first, on those college tours, I've never felt more invisible in my life than when I'm a parent on one of those college tours because you realize you don't matter at all. But I would say these schools, and I piss on them all the time, they're still fantastic places. [00:20:36] S0: You can get in. It's amazing.
00:20:37 · David Brooks
[00:20:37] S2: Get in. They're they're amazing places of deep learning. And what I'm hoping is the universities will do a couple things. First, expand, as you suggest, to allow more access. Second, do genuine intellectual diversity on campus. And so since I'm more conservative in the campus norm, I now talk politics, something I would never have done in the classroom. I'd said, look, I'm a conservative. I just wanna explain to you what it feels like why I became a conservative so you have some access. You know what a conservative looks like. And so that's strange to a lot of students. The third and most important thing is we need to redefine our definition of ability. There's whole system is based on a definition of ability, which is the ability to suck up to teachers between the ages of 15 and 18 and do well on standardized tests. That is not what genuine ability is. It doesn't allow for curiosity. It doesn't allow for determination, for drive, for social skills. And if we had a wider definition of ability that rich parents couldn't game as well to include those more humanistic traits, then it's more widely dispersed across populations. And we would have a more democratic student body because we'd measure the things that really matter that don't require you to go to a private school to get all the training. And so to me, the history of the meritocracy is the history of different definitions of ability. And we used to... It used to be if you were in a military society, it was military courage. Then in the nineteenth century, it was social breeding. Did you come over from the Mayflower? But in the nineteen thirties to nineteen fifties, the whole system switched over to IQ, and that's just an incredibly narrow definition of ability. So the only way to really diversify and democratize the system is to redefine what ability is, what we're gonna measure, what criteria we're gonna use to accept or reject kids. And we'll understand that the distinctions these days we draw between Princeton and, I don't know, Penn State, these are ridiculous distinctions. Williams and Amherst, you know, these are ridiculous. But we've built this hierarchy of status, which perverts and distorts all of society.
00:22:44 · Scott Galloway
[00:22:44] S0: Do you think, though... I wonder if the argument over the criteria for who gets in, whether it's going from more analytical to more qualitative, that it's the wrong argument, that it shouldn't be who gets in, the real argument, that's a misdirect from the key argument, and that is how many. And that is DEI is an initiative. DEI has caused a lot of problems on campus. I actually am, I don't wanna call it conservative here, but I think the DEI apparatus on campus should be disassembled. 60% of Harvard's freshman class identifies as non white, so what is the 140 person DEI apparatus actually doing? But at the same time, I think all of that is a misdirect from what we should be talking about, and that is how many get in. So junior colleges don't have a DEI problem, because you just show up, you pay the fee, you get in. And there's not all this manufactured stress over who gets in, and then an argument over who deserves advantage. And my premise has always been at the age of 18, I don't know about you, I was remarkably unremarkable. And I don't believe any organization, tester, or individual can be the arbiter of who's gonna be a success at 18. I think a lot about men. Our prefrontal cortex just doesn't fully develop till 25. And I didn't get my act together until I was in graduate school. And fortunately, Berkeley let me into graduate school at a 2.27 undergraduate GPA. And so these institutions are amazing, but why would they sequester this drug? Anyways, I'm sorry. A bit of a speech there. I'm curious what you think about the idea of mandatory national service.
00:24:13 · David Brooks
[00:24:13] S2: I couldn't be more enthusiastic about it, in part because it would get kids from Berkeley to meet kids from Birmingham, Alabama. And so... And then it would give students a sense of what this country is like, what different kinds of people that are in it, but it would also give them a sense that life is really about offering. What are you offering? And, you know, one of my favorite sayings about vocation is the famous one from the novelist Frederick Buechner. You find your calling where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need. And how do you find the world's deep need? You're probably not gonna find it at the office in McKinsey or on the campus of some fancy university. You have to go out to where the problems are. I'm also a fan of Viktor Frankl whose book Man's Search for Meaning Everybody Should Read. And he was an Austrian psychiatrist who was put in a Nazi concentration camp. And he realized the wrong question to ask about your life is, what do I want from life? The right question to ask is what is life asking of me? What problems are in front of me that that I'm uniquely qualified to take part in in addressing? And so to... National service would give kids a a chance to go out where the problems are, and they'll be moved by the injustice of homelessness. So they'll be moved by struggles in rural America. They'll be moved by urban poverty, and it's tapping into that calling will arouse tremendous energy levels. I just think it's become tremendously hard to be in your twenties these days in part because we don't give students enough avenues to find their purpose in life. And you can only do that by trying out a bunch of stuff in your twenties and figure out which touches your soul. I'm sort of like you. I graduated maybe halfway in my public high school class. I went to Chicago because in those days, Chicago was accepting 74%. And I... Just to underline something you said, I fervently agree with you that you can't predict how a person's gonna do, but by anything they do at age 18. They have not been formed. And the key to success in life is not how smart you were at 18, but whether you're capable of keep growing and learning all the days of your life. And I taught off and on at Yale for twenty years, and it's a wonderful place. I I think it's a fantastic place. But I noticed this phenomenon with some of my students.
00:26:33 · David Brooks, Scott Galloway
They were electric at 21. But by the time I would have coffee with them ten years after graduation, some light had gone out. They'd fallen into some career rut. They were not asking the big questions anymore. And so to me, I don't wanna know whether you're shiny at 18. I wanna know, are you capable of perpetual growth until you're a 100? And that that is a skill that you can't measure at 18. [00:26:57] S0: Talk about when do you believe... Do you bind to this thesis thesis that the idolatry of money has kind of overwhelmed and crowded out character, service, patriotism? What... Where do you stand on the thesis that it's the idolatry of money that has really, really hurt America?