Does Scott Still Teach at NYU? Private Clubs for the 1%, and How Money Changed Scott’s Life

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1:28Welcome to Office Hours with Prof G. This is the part of the show where we answer questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. What's happening? 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 officehoursofprofgmedia.com. Again, that's officehoursofprofgmedia.com. Or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode. What a thrill. First question.

2:01Our first question comes from WildSource1359 on Reddit. They ask, What's the deal with you as a teacher at NYU Stern? You currently live in London. You are constantly flying around the globe. How and how often do you actually teach? Is it over Zoom? Is it for a concentrated period of time, say one week? Okay, the bottom line is I have not taught at NYU a three-unit course since COVID. When I moved to London, I offered to resign, and they said, don't resign. You're good for the brand. Also, in 2017, when I sold my last company, I returned all of my compensation up until that point to NYU and said, I make a really good living.

2:43I've gotten really lucky. I don't want to take compensation from NYU or be a part of this industrial complex that keeps raising tuition. So I returned all my money. So I'm a pretty easy person not to fire right now. I don't cost them anything. As a matter of fact, I give money back to NYU. But I also do, I speak a lot there. I do symposiums. The deans have used me as a weapon occasionally for fundraising or to do talks in Europe. I'm moving back to the U.S. in about a year, and I will begin teaching again. But no, I haven't taught in a couple years. I do teach online courses for a section, which is upskilling enterprise professionals for AI.

3:20I do quite a bit of teaching there over Zoom, but I haven't taught in person. I'm actually a bit intimidated by it because I haven't done it in a while. I'm what you call, someone jokes, I'm a Pino, and that is a professor in name only right now. But I plan to teach again. I've taught about somewhere, I think, between 4 ,000 and 4 ,500 students over the last 23 years. And I was just a little bit burnt out on it, quite frankly. But I'm looking forward to getting back in front of the lectern in about 12 months time. Appreciate the question. Question number two. Our second question comes from Captain Lance Murdoch.

3:57Captain Lance Murdoch. Where did they get this shit? On Reddit, they say, Scott, you talk a lot about expensive private restaurant clubs separating the rich and by steering money away from open places, hurting the offline experience of the younger generation, just beginning to build wealth. Should there be a more affordable private club option that comes in below the top of the market and tries to bring the experience to more people? Could this work? Is the community and organized services that is the draw or is it simply the expense of exclusiveness that supports the model? Yeah. And I think the market will take care of this to a certain extent.

4:30See, these clubs are already going where you're going, and that is they're discriminating by age, which I have absolutely no problem with. I'm a member of, I join everything. I have a very, it's not even a fear of death. It's an embrace of death. I think my time here is limited. I think the amount of time I'm going to be willing to go out and get drunk and have people bump me and I'm not going to get aggravated or upset or endure the hangover or appreciate loud music or even be able to hear the people I'm having dinner with at a place with loud music. I think my days are numbered. So I want to do fucking everything.

5:02I want, I finally have the money. Most of my life, I didn't have money. I was always like saving for something or trying to buy a house or investing in a startup or paying off my debts after a fucking dot-com implosion or the great financial recession. So what they've done though, is they price discriminate by age. And that is they, almost all of them have junior memberships where I pay$5 ,000 or$5 ,500 a year, which is fucking insane. You pay$5 ,000 to go buy dinner and drink somewhere. But they spend a lot of money on the club, additional finishes, and they curate, quite frankly, they curate the people, a lot of cultural events.

5:36It's kind of aspirational when people are in town to take them to the hot new club or whatever. And also you're signaling your value. You're signaling that you're cool enough to be a member of Zero Bond or Chez Margot or you're, you know, you are a bit Euro trash and take them to Casa Cipriani, which I love, which I love. Weird location, downtown tip of Manhattan. It's kind of weird. I'm going to go down there. I'm like, I feel like I'm an escape from New York and Kurt Russell's going to show up with a sawed off shotgun or the zombies are going to come out of the water. Anyway, but typically if they're charging me$5 ,000, they're charging junior members$1 ,500 or$2 ,000.

6:10So that's still a lot of money. But if you want to be in a, you know, you want to be in a membership club, there's going to be membership, and they are starting to price discriminate. I think the anti-alcohol movement is terrible for young people. Terrible. I think the risk to your 25-year-old liver of alcohol are dwarfed by the risk of social isolation. And young people need to have more friends. They need to approach more strangers. They need to laugh more. They need to fuck more, quite frankly. And all of that leads to one place, alchemahol. And I just think the fact they're drinking less is not a good thing.

6:41And I'll get a lot of shit for that, but I'm sticking by my guns. If I look back on all my best friendships or romantic opportunities or great times, oftentimes they involved alcohol. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. And 90 to 95 percent of people, young people, can figure out a way to manage their substances and their professional life. Anyways, I would like to see a tax subsidy for third places. A third place can be a softball league, obviously religious institutions or nonprofit, outfit, Nike's running club where they get people together in person, subsidized gyms where people can bump off one another.

7:16I'd like to see some sort of tax credit where if you aggregate enough young people in person, you get special tax status as a third space. Because where on earth are young people supposed to meet and fall in love? They aren't going into work. They aren't going to school. They're doing remote school. They're not going to religious institutions. So anyways, a long-winded way of saying I'd like to see more emphasis and more opportunities for young people to get out and find friends, mentors, and mates. And anyways, back to your original question. These clubs are smart. They're offering a junior membership because, quite frankly, they want more younger people.

7:52They see an opportunity. Those people can't afford the same price point. And also, being a cool club and aspirational just involves having a lot of young people there or a decent number of young people. I appreciate the question, and I hope I see you out drinking and enjoying yourself. We'll be right back after a quick break.

8:31Close that deal? Yeah, you won. Do that, doing that, did that, done. Now you can do that, do that with Acrobat. Now you can do that, do that with the all-new Acrobat. It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio. Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique. Fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say. So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything, from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more.

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10:00Welcome back. Our final question also comes from Reddit. User Boe's Tender OC asks, How did your life change when you made money? I'm curious to hear about your transition from poor to able to pay the bills, to millionaire, to deca-millionaire, to a hundred millionaire. We've gotten some hints from your stories, but it would be interesting to hear more. I think a lot about money, and I talk a lot about it, and I think this zeitgeist that you're not supposed to talk about money is nothing but an effort by rich people to keep the poor middle class down. If you want to be good at something, you need to think about it and talk about it a lot.

10:35And talking about it a lot gives you ideas and opportunities and can be quite cathartic because a lot of us are struggling or stressed out by money and don't want to talk about it for fear makes us seem weak. And I think it's helpful to understand different tricks and different opportunities and the tax code and what your friends are making, such that if you're being underpaid, you can be more aggressive about finding another job. So I talk about money a lot. And I'm probably think about it too much. I didn't grow up with a lot of money. I went to UCLA, almost had trouble paying my bills at UCLA, had trouble paying my bills out of UCLA, went to Cal, no money, had a 1984 Honda Accord.

11:13I was happy and I was fun. and then poured all my money into my first company profit. I started making money basically when I found a partner who was also making good money, and the two of us together could start living a nice life. The best thing for me, I mean, one, you have a nicer life when you have money. I was able to move into a nice home in San Francisco, but the motivator for me and the biggest payoff for me was I got to take care of my mom, and I got to spoil my mom before she passed away. And I know that's a lot of virtue signaling, but it's true. My mom had taken really good care of me on a secretary's salary.

11:46So I remember, I'll always remember, I got one of my first clients at Profit. My brand strategy firm was William Sonoma. And one of my mentors there, this really wonderful guy was the CMO named Pat Connolly gave me, he said, don't tell anyone, but I heard your mom just moved into a retirement home, a retirement community. I'm going to give you an employee discount. And I decorated my mom's entire house in Pottery Barn. And she just thought this was like the most opulent thing that she'd ever like, that she'd ever experienced in her life. And it was such a nice moment for me to like serve that role as protector and kind of spoil my mom.

12:23That's the first thing I think about when I think about money. The next thing was getting to do really nice things, experiencing great things. I like spending money. I'm good at it. How do you get good? There's so many people don't know how to spend their fucking money. If you have a lot of money and you don't have a nice place to live and you don't go to F1 in Montreal or you don't go to Cannes Lions or you don't meet your friends in Vegas and go see U2 at The Sphere, like what's the fucking point? Spend it. And that's when you know you have some financial security. But I kind of went from never having enough money to having a decent amount of money to all of a sudden having a shit ton of money.

12:59It's like aging. I was always the youngest person in the room and then all of a sudden I was the oldest person in the room. I was never the same age and that's kind of the trajectory of my wealth. I was always reinvesting back in my companies, failing, reinvesting, failing, getting by, decent living, but not a lot of money. And then I hit it big, mostly because the markets went crazy from about 2009 to now and was in the right place at the right time with the right skin color, outdoor plumbing, able to raise a shit ton of money. Also, I'm not humble. I'm a fucking monster. I'm in the top 1%, but my wealth is way more than the top 1 % because the smartest thing I've ever done was be born in America in the 60s, a white heterosexual male.

13:35A lot of my success is not my fault. So being able to take care of my mom, getting to do nice things, and now money for me is really an absence of stress. What do I mean by that? When my first son came rotating out of my girlfriend, all I felt was shame and fear. It was 2008. I had just lost pretty much everything in the Great Financial Recession, and I thought, you know, I'm failing as a father. That was literally my first instinct. It wasn't like angels singing in some fucking insurance commercials. Like, I've failed this kid. I don't have enough money. And I was very scared. I was really stressed out about money and not being, it's one thing like to fail yourself.

14:14I'm talented. I can always make enough money to take care of myself. And I'm like, God, I don't have as much money as I thought I was going to have. So getting financial security and economic security for me was just an absence of stress. And happiness is not only a function of the things you have, it's a function of the things that you don't have, specifically an absence from stress that if you find out your wife has lung cancer, it doesn't also mean you're going to bankrupt. And then my kids' struggles are not going to be a function of my inability to provide for them. And that's just an enormous unlock.

14:45It's always been something, and I know you can have a middle-class life and live well and raise your kids well. I was always, I don't know, I've just taken too much incorrectly self-esteem or lack thereof from my economic viability. So in absence of stress, and now it's, I do amazing things with money. And I think I'm really good at it. I hit my number and I decided to get off the money hamster wheel. I hit my number eight years ago, unless I really fuck up, which I've done several times, but unless I really fuck up again and I'm trying not to, I'm diversifying, I should be fine. And so what I do is I've decided there's just no reason why I would ever need to be a billionaire.

15:23When I sold my company in 2017, I thought I'm going to take 25 million and raise another 250 and start a private equity fund because I would like to someday be a billionaire. And then I read some stuff and I'm like, why would I want to be a billionaire? Why would I want back on this hamster wheel of stress? And I've been working my ass. I've been doing nothing but working for a quarter century. I had boys at home. I had a wonderful partner. I had a capitalist society that lets you hang out at some Argentinian super cool hotel for a thousand bucks a night and go eat amazing food. And then, you know, I give the tech guy here a hundred bucks and he finds me a Mac laptop and he thinks he's died and gone to heaven because I gave him a hundred bucks and I can go back to when I was a waiter and someone gave me money and it made me feel really good.

16:05I can feel masculine. I can feel important. But where I am now is I'm going to, every year I look at my number and anything above that number, I do one of two things. I either spend it. I love to spend money. I'm selfish. I love to have a good time. I do amazing things. I have a plane. I never let money get in the way of a good time. If my friends are busy, I'll send the plane for them. If they don't have as much money or they're not as blessed, I pay for shit. It makes me feel good. I have no reciprocal expectation around them doing anything back. If that sounds like I'm virtue signaling, I am, but it's also true.

16:38I can pay people really well, which makes me feel important and masculine. And then anything above that, I give away. And I don't think of it as philanthropy. I think of it as consumption. When I give money to the University of California, when I give money to charities focused on teen depression, I'm like, OK, I can talk about struggling young men because I am fucking walking the walk. You want to have money such that you can reduce the stress in your life. You can take care of people who you love and have been good to you. You can try to restore some of the incredible values and recognize the opportunities that were given to you and make sure those opportunities are presented to other people.

17:11and you can pay people well and you give money away and you can have a fucking ball of time and you can be really fucking masculine. It feels amazing to spend money and to give it away. That was a lot. Anyways, thanks for the question. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehours at propgmedia.com. Again, 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.

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