Office Hours: Six-Day Workweek vs. Four-Day Workweek, The Illusion of College Selectivity, Monitoring Your Substance Use

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0:52Welcome to the Prop G Pod's Office Hours. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. 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. I have not heard or seen these questions. First question. This is Josie coming to you from Charleston, South Carolina. I had a question I would be so grateful for Mr. Galloway to address, specifically relating to the concept of a six-day workweek. As compared with the four-day workweek, I'm hearing often referred to in various industries nowadays.

1:30days. My daughter is an adolescent enrolled in a education program geared towards elite athletes and students pursuing artistic endeavors who don't feel they have enough time to pursue their interests outside of a regular full-day school day. And this school caters to them in that it provides half-day studies in a classic school environment without the classic school schedule which gives these kids great freedom to pursue outside interests and made me start to wonder how could we apply this to our work week as adults too? Would we not be more productive if we could take half days to work and pursue our own outside interests and live our lives the rest of the day?

2:25And would this be worth a six-day work week to many people? I know it would be to me. How do you feel this would affect productivity in the United States if we were not so devoted to the five-day work week? Josie from Charleston, South Carolina, thanks for the question. I had an academic call me. So about every, used to be every week, now it's every month, I would say an academic from another university will call me and ask for advice. And basically what they're asking for in the most polite way is my research and my work is so much more impressive than yours, Professor Galloway, yet you're so much more famous than me.

3:05How do we close the gap? I got very lucky and I was able to reinvent myself. And I think I had some skill at figuring out where the next wave was coming from. In the 90s, I was in e-commerce. In the 2000s, I started getting into thinking a lot about benchmarking and analytics. And then I kind of pivot to how technology disrupts traditional industry. If I were an academic right now, I would do all of my research and try and become the foremost thought leader on the intersection between human capital and this thing called the workplace. How is human capital, how does it interface with the organization, both in terms of time, place, cadence?

3:40The honest answer is, I don't know. What I do think is interesting is we're going to have much more flexible formats. There's not only formats, there's place. And all the energy has been focused on place. Should you be in an office or should you be at home? But format is obviously just as important. In 2022, the nonprofit organization Four Day Week Global, in partnership with Cambridge University and Boston College, conducted two six-month trials in the U.S. and Ireland that included 33 companies and I think about 1 ,000 employees. They found that a shorter work week is better for both employees and employers.

4:1555 % of employees reported an increase in their productivity and engagement at work. Job satisfaction was reported higher for over 45 % of participants and 60 % said it improved their work-life balance. While there's been a lot of research done on the benefits of a four-day work week, there hasn't been done much on your idea regarding a six-day work week of half days. There is, however, research on the effects of reduced work hours on employee productivity and well-being. In 2014, Stanford University found that productivity per hour declined sharply when a person works over 50 hours a week. In fact, researchers concluded that employees who work up to 70 hours a week are getting the same amount of work done as those putting in 55 hours a week.

4:56Also, how much you work can have an impact on your health, Sue. A study conducted by the World Health Organization and International Labor Organization revealed that working more than 55 hours a week was associated with an estimated 35 % greater risk of stroke and heart disease. So much of this is about where you are in your life and what you want from your life. I used to be that guy that worked 80 hours a week in my 20s and 30s, mostly because I was starting my own business and I wanted desperately to be successful. And I saw the amount of time I worked as something I could control. I couldn't control the market.

5:31I couldn't control my clients. I could control the product and what we were producing. and I directly saw the correlation between the amount of time I spent at work and our work product. Some of it was unhealthy. I expected other people to work as hard as me and I created, I don't wanna call it toxic, that's overworked, but I created a less healthy atmosphere than I should have. And part of it is an abused child syndrome and that is my first job was at Morgan Stanley. You were there before anyone senior to you, which was everybody, and you weren't allowed to leave until everyone senior to you left.

6:03and I worked usually most weekends. And so I just kind of grew up thinking that was how you, you know, that was how you paid your dues. And what you realize is that's bullshit. People should work and be productive, but FaceTime is not that healthy. Something I did tack onto early, and I'm proud of this, is that some of our most productive employees, some of our most valuable employees, were stay-at-home moms. And we offer them flexibility. We said, come into the office two days a week and you can stay at home and take care of your kids. And in the 90s, that was very progressive, as in not that many companies did that.

6:38And I was able to tap into this incredibly underutilized workforce called moms. To a certain extent, the rise of the gig economy isn't about the consumer value proposition. It's about the worker value proposition. And that is, if you offer people flexibility via their smartphone and technology, you can have a flexible and inexpensive workforce that values the flexibility more than market wages, if you will. And some people would say that's exploitive. But when you talk to people and give work, they like it. So there's a lot going on here. I personally, just my gut is on a six-day work week, even if it's a half day.

7:14I think there's something about having a decent chunk of time away from work that's really important for mental health. I'm one of these people that lives to work, doesn't work to live. Most people are the latter. And I think most people do need a break and to clear their heads in sort of an extended meditation away from work and to spend time with their families and sort of reset, if you will. What I do think the big unlock or the big opportunity is, is I would like to see a classification of what's called a care worker. And that is someone that's taking care of kids, taking care of parents, taking care of their own physical or mental health that is given special accommodation to work remotely.

7:51I think that is a real unlock and will make society better. But I have always said, and I'll end here, if you're a young person trying to establish currency in the workplace, an office is a feature, not a bug. You want to find mentors, you want to find colleagues, and you want to find mates. Get into the office. But yeah, thanks for the question. Question number two. Hi, Scott. This is Marianne from Pelham, New York, just outside New York City. My dog and I thank you and Kara for the content that powers our morning walks. We're big fans of Prof G and Pivot. My question is about the importance of brand name college degrees, something I know from prior episodes that you have strong feelings about.

8:29Some context for anyone who's not following what's going on in college admissions right now. The college admissions process is going through an unprecedented experience. It's been called application inflation. High school students are applying to more schools than ever, and it's jamming up admissions offices. But it's also giving colleges a fantastic opportunity to fortify the quality of their incoming classes, and perhaps more importantly, for the business of being a college, giving them never-seen-before boosts to their rankings and stature. While they struggle to properly review this higher number of applications, colleges love this as their acceptance percentages are dropping precipitously.

9:08The result? Colleges that students used to consider on target are now reach schools, and colleges that used to be safety schools are becoming target schools. So it begs the following questions. Where does it go from here? If Michigan is the new Duke and Providence is the new Notre Dame, will we see schools with lower rankings and lesser brand names start to achieve greater prominence? Is there anything to indicate that the quality of academics increases in parallel with this numbers game? More importantly, what's it all for anyway? How important is the brand name college degree in scoring the internships and first jobs that set someone on a path towards career success?

9:49And finally, Scott, do you see this obsession with brand name degrees calming down anytime soon? Thanks for your thoughts every day, and in particular, on this topic. Wow, a lot there. We're going to need a bigger boat. I'm not I'm going to be able to get to all the substance of your question. So some context. According to data released by Common App this February, the number of college applications filed through the Common App, which is an undergraduate college admissions application used by more than 1 ,000 institutions, has increased by 30 % over the past three years. So think about that. Applications to universities up 30 % because there's a Common App, so it's not hard to put in that incremental sixth, seventh, eighth application.

10:28This year's class sent approximately 1.6 million more applications compared to the class of 2020, despite the fact that both classes have a similar number of students. Even NYU is experiencing this application inflation. NYU's newly admitted class of 2027 dropped the acceptance rate to its lowest ever, 8%. Can you imagine? I shouldn't say 8 % acceptance. They should call it 92 % rejection. 120 ,000 students applied to the university during this admission cycle, making it the greatest number of applications ever received. Jesus Christ, think about this, 120 ,000 students. So to answer your question, does it matter where you did college?

11:04Some data. A study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2000 found that getting a degree from a selective institution was associated with an 11 % to 16 % increase in earnings for men and a 12 % increase in earnings for women. And if you compound that over a lifetime, that's a big difference. It's also important to remember that what you study plays a role and how much money we'll make. A 2015 contemporary economic policy study concluded that for careers in STEM, it doesn't matter as much whether students go to an elite brand named college. However, for business and liberal arts majors, the prestige of the school had a major impact on future earnings expectations.

11:40For business majors in particular, graduates from selective institutions earn 12 % more than mid-tier graduates and 18 % more than graduates from less selective colleges. So in sum, I've always said that the top of any kind of the tails, if you will, or the top tail or the top 10 % of any university are very similar. But there's just no getting around it. I think a lot of people shitpost elite universities because they are angry at the rejectionist exclusionary culture we've developed at these universities where we've decided that the ultimate business strategy is to adopt the same business strategy as the wealthiest man in the world, Bernard Arnault.

12:19And what is that? It's a luxury position. Every day, the leadership and faculty faculty at universities wake up and ask themselves the same question. How do I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability? And the answer is, I know, the ultimate business strategy, a luxury positioning. And how do you create a luxury brand? Artificial scarcity. So rather than putting those billions of dollars to work, rather than holding faculty accountable for all these bullshit courses and departments that aren't measurable, how do you measure a leadership center? How do you measure an ethics class?

12:51How do you measure the outcomes of sustainability? I mean, diversity and inclusion departments in what are the most diverse and inclusive places in the world? And granted, I want to acknowledge that when you let in people from different backgrounds, you do need additional resources to help them succeed in environments where they may not have the same, I don't know, the same soft entry or easy entry that some more privileged kids might have. But for God's sakes, all we do, or not all we do, a lot of what we do at universities is create jobs that never go away, that don't have any measurable output, such that we can think big thoughts and pay ourselves decent money and have no accountability.

13:30And the result is a transfer of wealth from middle-class households to universities of$1.5 trillion. And what do we do? The only way you can borrow money is if you get accredited. And who runs the accreditation associations? The incumbents who have grown universities at a whopping 1.4 % a year. So what do you know? Artificially constrict supply, make common apps such that we go up in the rankings because the rankings, which are just mendacious fuck times eight pages of mendacious fuckery inside a magazine because they encourage us to do exactly what's wrong for society. They encourage us to reject more applicants because then we'll go up in the rankings.

14:07So you're absolutely right. What was a safety school has become aspirational. When I applied to college, Berkeley was a stretch. UCLA was a good school, not a great school. And if you didn't get into either of those, you could absolutely no problem go to Cal State Northridge or UC Boulder or San Diego State even. Now those schools are prestigious schools, meaning they're difficult to get into. So what does that mean? It means great kids are getting arbitraged down to just okay schools. And that's fine. If you're a great student at a good school, you're going to be just fine. who really suffers here is that we have decided that you failed as a parent if your kid doesn't end up in college.

14:45So he or she applies to some good schools, doesn't get into any, and ends up at an average to kind of a below average school that has the same price. Why? Why? Because we make the OPEC cartel look like fucking amateur hour. Do you think it's any accident that we all raise tuition at the exact same number every year? So what happens? A good student, not a great student, a good applicant, not a great applicant, ends up getting arbitraged down to a Hyundai, but still gets stuck with a Mercedes bill. And so what do they do? They borrow money because we've fallen into this trap of thinking that if our kid doesn't get a traditional four-year degree, that we have failed as parents and we don't want to be shamed.

15:24And you want to make sure that your little marvel, your little miracle ends up at college. And it has gotten to the point where for some, maybe many of these kids, they would be better off getting a limited amount of training or certification, which is hard to come by because of our underinvestment of vocational training in this country. But for the first time, when kids call me and tell me about how much they're going to have to spend to go to a mediocre school, I am saying, maybe you should think about other options. So what can be done here? There's a lot that can be done. One, stop this rejectionist culture.

15:53First off, we need better rankings to take into account diversity and how many kids have Pell Grants and how fast are they growing. It shouldn't be about their admissions rate. It should be about how many kids are taking from the bottom fifth of the income quintile and putting them in the top fifth. By the way, the university that does that the best in New York pays to university, and they should be giving more federal funding to expand their freshman seats. Instead of bailing out the one-third of America that got to go to college and putting that burden on all Americans, including the two-thirds that didn't go to college, we should have taken half of that$700 billion and done a grand bargain with our thousand biggest public universities, and it goes something like this.

16:32Okay,$350 billion, 1 ,000 universities, that's$350 million on average to each university if you do the following. You're going to make a massive investment in technology infrastructure. You're going to hold your faculty accountable, and we are going to scale your admissions by 6 % a year. Very doable with that kind of help from Uncle Sam. At the same time, you're going to use those technology investments and that efficiency to reduce costs by 2 % to 3 % a year. Tuition, reduce tuition. What does that mean? In 10 years, we double the number of freshman seats at our public universities, and on an inflation-adjusted basis, we cut the cost in half.

17:08College isn't for everybody, but you know what it is for everybody? The opportunity to go to college. You know what we also need? What we also need? More vocational programming. Oh my God, that was a rant. That was a rant. Interesting question. I could go on about this all night, as you imagine. I've got to get to our break and our next question but thanks so much for the interesting thoughtful question we'll be right back

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18:38Welcome back. Question number three. Hey, Prof G. My name's Matt. I'm a 38-year-old tattoo artist in San Diego, California. I really appreciate your recent comments on your own alcohol use and how it's been affecting your health and well-being. It feels like in most media it's either romanticized or vilified with no real objective evaluation. There's a significant amount of substance abuse in my industry as with many others, and I've recently decided to reevaluate my own use of alcohol. My question is what your personal evaluation is for when a substance is being overused, when to slow down, when to take a break, or even just try and quit.

19:17We're all a bit different, but I'd love to hear what your personal self-check is for these things. That's a really thoughtful question, Matt. And I just want to say it's very rewarding to hear that our program inspires you to think about important things like this. And by the way, you have a great voice, a 38-year-old tattoo artist in San Diego with a dreamy voice. It's good to be mad. Anyways, that's not your question. So there's some nuance here. And that is, I tell young people to just ask themselves one question as it relates to their addictions, whether it's online shopping, whether it's porn, whether it's trans fats, whether it's an unhealthy relationship, whether it's alcohol, whether it's THC, just go through each of them and think, would my life be nicer and or would I be a little less shitty at a few things if I did less of this.

20:08You are cursed. If you are addicted to trans fats and you're overweight, you're going to make less money. People make terrible stereotypes about you and don't see you as a leader. You're going to be less healthy. You're going to have a much more greater likelihood of struggling with issues. Diabetes is sort of the high blood pressure of high blood pressure that creates underlying danger and makes everything worse across heart disease and cancer. So I think it's good to just take a regular audit. My audit was the following. I was having trouble the next day. I used to be able to go out and drink two or three, four, maybe five drinks and not really, I mean, the next day, a couple of Advil maybe, but I was on fire the next day still.

20:51Now I find my decisions. It takes, my decision time is going down. And also I'm just intellectually realizing that, okay, and I learned this at the father-son basketball game at my school when I went up for a rebound and came down and my niece said, oh, guess what? We're no longer 25-year-old knees, and I've been limping around for the last four months. It's just a good time to take pause and say, based on my age, based on where I am in my life, if I drank a little bit less, would I be able to spend more time with my kids in the morning? If I smoked a little bit less, would I be maybe a little less, I don't know, a little sharper the next day?

21:27If I got my diet in order, Would I feel a little bit better about myself? Would I have just more endurance, be in better shape, be able to, I don't know, have better sex, look better in clothes, just feel a little bit healthier? So there's a lot. I don't know if there's a – I don't have an algorithm for it. I just think, okay, this is where I am in my life. This is how things have changed. Drinking for me when I was younger was a positive. It helped me meet people. It helped me bond with friends. It helped me make new clients, find new investors. I went out with people and I drank. And I'm a good drunk.

22:04And I wouldn't say I would get drunk, but I'm a social drinker. I'm more social. I am a better version of me, a little bit fucked up. It helped me professionally. But it's come to a point in my life. I have a 12 and a 15-year-old at home. I'm 58. It's getting harder and harder to maintain the level of fitness I want. I want to be very engaged in their lives. I don't have them for much longer. And I want to drink less. And so I've cut down. Some people, the decision on whether you go cold turkey or not, I think that's a very personal decision. I don't think it's a bad idea to check in with somebody who really understands this stuff, who's dealt with abuse, and give them a sense of where you are in your life and whether you need to cut it all out.

22:45I find a little bit actually reduces my stress and anxiety, and I think it's probably accretive to my health. But I don't think there's an algorithm here, Matt. It's a really thoughtful question, but you're 38. you're in the industry. If you cut down your drinking, could you grow your business? Would you be better at your artistry if you took some of that money you spent on partying and allocated it, I don't know, towards upgrading your skills, upgrading the tattoo parlor your own, I don't know, your business, spending it more on dating, spending it more on your kids or your wife? I think it's look at your consumption.

23:19And what I do is I write down my consumption and I add it up. And what really freaked me out and was a real motivator is I go out two, three times a week. I have four or five Makers and Ginger. That's 15 drinks. That's basically a bottle of Makers. And I love Makers. I'm going to continue drinking it. But do I need to be putting a bottle of Makers in my liver every day? I mean, that just can't be good. Could a 38-year-old Scott Galloway handle that? Yeah. My 38-year-old liver seemed to metabolize it. No problem. Could my 58-year-old liver handle that? I don't know, and I don't want to find out.

23:54But 38 in San Diego is a tattoo artist. It is good to be you. Also, also look at your peer group. When I'm around friends that party a lot, I party a lot. When I'm not, I don't party as much. So if you want to change your life around your consumption of alcohol or drugs or substances, one thing you're going to have to evaluate is your peer group and who you spend time with. Thanks for the question. That's all for this episode. Again, 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.

24:41This episode was produced by Caroline Chagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prof G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need.