The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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?
00:27:12 · David Brooks
[00:27:12] S2: Yeah. I would say it's... That's a rhythm in American life where money becomes the dominant ethos. And you would say the eighteen eighties, the eighteen nineties, we were incredibly materialistic society. But what you need is a moral system that stands against capitalism. So you live in the in the contest and the tension between capitalism, say, and Catholicism, or capitalism and Judaism, or frankly, capitalism and progressivism. These are all systems or capitalism and environmentalism. These are all systems that push against some of the worst flaws of capitalism and give you a a moral basis to make your decision, a sense of right and wrong, not just richer or poorer. And so I think creative people live in the tension between those two things. And I think what we've seen is the collapse of all rival systems. One of my favorite things from psychology is from a guy named John Bowlby who does attachment research. Says all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. We need that secure base. And that secure base fundamentally is about your relationship with your parents having secure attachments. But it's also about having a secure home, hometown, a safe neighborhood. But it's also about a moral order. The sense that you live within a coherent moral order, and you can make the decisions of your life based on this. There was a historian named George Marsden who wrote once that what gave Martin Luther King's rhetoric such power was his sense that there was a moral order woven into the fabric of universe. That segregation was not just wrong sometimes. Segregation was always wrong. Slavery is always wrong under all circumstances. And so that you... That gives you a sense of security if you have a sense that, yes, that right and wrong are permanent. And we took that away. We privatized morality. We told people it's up to you to come up with your own values. And if your name is Aristotle or Nietzsche, maybe you can do this. Most of us can't come up with our own values, and we're left in sort of a formless world that gives no security. Way back in 1955, a great columnist named Walter Lippmann wrote a book in which he wrote that if what is right and wrong is just what each individual invents based on his or her feelings, We have left the bounds of civilization, and I think we have left those bounds.
00:29:27 · David Brooks, Scott Galloway
So it's a loss of social security, friends, family are weakening, community base is weakening, and moral base is weakening. And that to me explains what I think is the deep root cause of our... A lot of our political problems, which is a spiritual and relational crisis, the rise of disconnection, the rise of loneliness, the rise of suicide. Forty five percent of teenagers say they're persistently hopeless and despondent. The number of Americans who say they have no close friends has gone up fourfold since 2000. And so we've just seen a decay at the foundations of society, and that has perverted our politics. [00:30:03] S0: Let's try and move to solutions. A spiritual and personal disconnection. How do you think we repair this? If you, I imagine, get called a lot by probably not this White House, but you probably have a lot of influencing it, asked a lot. What what are the two or three programs you believe warrant real investment and attention to try and heal this this decay? [00:30:26] S2: Well, first on the political front, you know, I thought Joe Biden had one job, and his job was to redirect resources to the places that have been left behind. And I thought he basically succeeded at that. If you look at the people who received the money from the Build Back Better and the big infrastructure bills and all that stuff, they're mostly Republican rural places. And [00:30:45] S0: if