The Reddit Hotline Is Open: Scott on Generational Wealth, Dirty Jokes & A Bull Case for Reddit

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1:23Download today. Welcome 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. Today, we've got two great listener questions lined up. And then after the break, we're introducing something new. The Reddit hotline. Oh, my God. It's not the red phone. It's not the bad phone. It's the Reddit hotline where we pull questions straight from Reddit. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehoursofproftymedia.com. Again, that's officehoursofproftymedia.com.

1:58or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit. That's scary. What shit must be flying around on that thing? And we just might feature it in our next episode. By the way, just a little bit of insight. Let's bring this back to me. So we did in South by Southwest, we did a party or Vox did a party, which is basically where they feature all their quote unquote talent or lack thereof, their podcasters to try and get advertisers to advertise more on our podcasts. and they let out some information. Basically, Vox, like every other organization, holds onto information like nuclear codes because an asymmetry of information creates advantage for the people who have the information.

2:38But they did let out the following, that one of our fastest growing segments of anything I do across this entire, let's be honest, I'm a total podcast tour. I'm like, hey, stranger, what's your name? Another podcast? Sure, why not? But the pod that's doing or growing the fastest is actually office hours. And office hours, the vision for office hours was when my mom and I, I moved in with my mom for about eight months when she was very sick. And what one of the things we used to do was we would watch her favorite show, Frasier, and I based office hours on the Colin show on Frasier. Anyways, welcome.

3:17Hi, this is Dr. Crane and I'm listening. First question.

3:24Hi, Prof G. This is Brian from New Jersey, and I want to say thanks for doing such a great job offering an analysis on a wide range of topics and your genuine concern for people despite party politics. I'm involved with a small, successful school adjacent to New York City that exists solely on tuition. Last week, I heard you talking with Jess Tarlov about school choice, but the reality is not everyone who sends their children to a private school are doing so from a place of excess. The public schools in our area are overcrowded and parents have little to no say about what their children are learning or experiencing.

3:58Do you see any value, even if it was a means-tested program, for some sort of voucher or tax incentive to take children from the public school and support smaller schools that run more efficiently? From my very slanted perspective, for a third of the money of public schools, we're doing a better job. And at the same time, if the public schools were getting two-thirds of the money not to have a child in the classroom, they could devote more resources to the children who are there. Thanks for listening, and I really look forward to your answer. So let me be clear, and I'm going to acknowledge up front, there's no such thing as a perfect solution where everybody wins.

4:36I think you make a solid argument for why there are instances where vouchers probably help good people afford programs, maybe put some competition on the public schools. When I look at – so the U.S. is strange. Our K-12 is some of the worst in the modern or G7 economy, but our universities are some of the best. And our education or our economy is beating everybody. So a lot of people would just do the analysis and say, well, shitty K-12, that's sort of the hunger games. you have rich parents or you're excellent and somehow you find a way to a good college, seems to be working for the U.S. economy.

5:09The problem is, I think it results in a lot of obesity, anxiety, young people without the skills to thrive in this economy that don't have a lot of economic power and probably, I don't wanna say get exploited, but leverage for minimum wage that should be$23 an hour, not$7.25 based on productivity or just inflation. So I feel as if the public school system is yet another example of not a direct conspiracy, but the accidental conspiracy of creating the bottom 90 % who become very cheap inputs for shareholders of bigger companies that know how to manage the information economy and end up, quite frankly, just being exploited and paying a lot of money for shitty sugary food and then becoming obese and then being handed over to the diabetes industrial complex.

5:52So part of that system, though, is I think that when I look at healthy societies where there's low childhood obesity, They have a private school option, but essentially there's just much more focus on the resources and measurements for good public schools. On average, American public school teachers make roughly$70 ,000 annually, while their private counterparts make about$50 ,000. So you're absolutely right. It appears that on average public schools are paying people 40 % more. Because quite frankly, you end up with probably a more difficult situation with a lot of low-income kids that probably bring a lot of anger.

6:26maybe a single-parent home where the parents can't be involved in the kid's life. Whatever the excuse is, but public school teachers, the market is saying we need to pay them more. And private schools don't have to pay as much. Despite this, private school students consistently score better on assessments in almost every subject. In some, teachers' increased wages don't necessarily correlate with better outcomes. Why? Because the public school system is riddled with bureaucracy, quite frankly. And I think this kind of buttresses your point. In America, there are four times as many administrators in the public education system than there were in the 1950s.

7:03In 2015, the New York State School Board Association found that firing an incompetent teacher takes an average of 830 days and costs$313 ,000. The good news? School choice bills or laws that allow states to award vouchers to the parents of students in non-public schools are on the rise. This is true even across party lines. A 2024 poll of registered voters found that 83 % of Republicans, 69 % of Independents, and 70 % of Democrats say they strongly or somewhat support school choice. I am really torn on this because what I have seen is the net effect of school choice or vouchers just subsidizes wealthy people who were going to send their kids to public or to private schools anyways.

7:44And this is Pulse Marketing, but my kids were at this lovely private school in Gulfstream, Florida called Gulfstream that costs 18 or 20 grand. And the idea that we were going to give people in the local community, we'd get$10 ,000 towards a school. I think all that would have done was of the 230 families, 200 of them would have just got a$2 million tax break. And taking money away from Atlantic, the high school, which is actually a pretty good high school that they desperately need. Now, are there probably middle-class families that would be able to attend a better school because of that$10 ,000 voucher?

8:21Yes. Is it good to have competition put on public schools? Yes. When we're talking about education, though, I mean, it gets so complicated so fast. So the Department of Education is supposedly on the chopping block. And I'm not one of these people that doesn't think the Department of Education should, you know, is this, it used to be sort of this virtue signaling, everyone rallied around it. I think it should probably be much smaller. It's good at Pell Grants. It's good at figuring out student loans. It's probably done a lot of harm in terms of universal and mandatory testing, where every teacher now studies to the test.

8:52It's created a lot of unnecessary stress in our public schools. Parents hate it. Principals hate it. Teachers hate it. Students hate it. And I feel as if they, again, are trying to justify their own bureaucracy. So this is a long-winded way of saying I see your point, but one, I'm on board with a dramatic decrease in the amount of bureaucracy through competition with public schools. I believe that teachers and principals should be fired and schools should be shut down if they're not performing and new ones should be propped up. But I think we've got to figure out a way to get more parents involved in public schools because the number one signal of whether a school is successful isn't even resources.

9:33It's parental involvement. So trying to make public schools more attractive and the way you do that, I think, is with a lack of bureaucracy. And also, I just think it's gonna take more resources. And I don't think that skimming the most blessed families and the most involved parents off of the top and pulling them out of the public school system, I just think we're further cementing a have and have not caste system. Having said that, I think most of it should be left to the states and local governments trying to figure it out. One of the biggest problems we have in our society is that local schools are based on property tax revenues.

10:12So the wealthy neighborhoods have some private schools. The public school in Palo Alto and in Woodside is better than most private schools nationally because they have a lot of money from property taxes. So there has to be a leveling up. The problem is that the leveling up isn't just about resources. It's about keeping dual parent households involved in the schools. This is a difficult, tough question. More competition, more holding the teachers unions and public schools accountable, not being afraid to shut them down, having a reasonable ratio of administrators, clearing out the bureaucracy such that you can fire teachers and bureaucrats.

10:49But also, I'm just not down with taking more money for vouchers for the privatization of our education system. I think in general, you've had an oligarchy that is trying to insert a profit motive into every single public service, which ultimately just creates scale, a better service, and then they start raising the rents on everybody. Appreciate the question. Question number two. Hey, Scott, big fan of the podcast. I'm a young man looking to start investing, and I want to hear more about your view on the Reddit stock. I know I listened to the podcast Professor Monday, you said you were bullish on this stock.

11:23I tend to agree with you through my own research. Would love to hear more about your outlook on Reddit and what you see for the next five, 10 years with this stock. Thanks, Anonymous from Unknown. Really appreciate the question. So my IPO recommendation of 2024 was Reddit, and it was a simple analysis. I looked at the 10 most traffic sites in America, and all of them except Wikipedia, nonprofit, traded for, were worth between$600 billion and$3 trillion. And Reddit at that time was toggling based on the metric you looked at somewhere between the third and the fifth most traffic site in America and was going public in a market cap of$5 billion.

12:03Because to that point, they had not done a great job of monetizing that incredible attention. However, I believe over time, you can monetize attention. It just, I remember looking at these charts 20 years ago where newspapers were 10 % of attention but 30 % of advertising, and the internet was 50 % of attention, but only 15 % of advertising. I'm like, okay, this is pretty easy. Find the internet companies that are commanding attention, and eventually these things are going to calibrate and equalize. And I saw the same thing here. And the stock went out at, was priced, I think, at 35 or 38, shot to 60, and then went as high as 240, and has now, has been cut in half with the drawdown.

12:43So as we're recording this, their stock has been cut in half in the past month after Q4 earnings that reported underwhelming user growth. But that's still up. I think that still means it's tripled or quadrupled since its IPO. Global Daily Active Unique users rose 39 % year-on-year to an average of 102 million, just missing analyst expectations of 103 million. Why did it get hit so hard? The new meeting expectations in the Internet economy is blowing them away. That's the expectation. The expectation is that you're going to blow away our expectations. Although Reddit was now or is now the sixth most visited website in the world, it's worth 50 to 60 times less than other sites that command that same attention, including Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

13:29So what do I think? I think this company is still a good long-term hold. It's got a market cap now of$22 billion, which for a guy like me, one of my many flaws as investors, I anchor off the cheapest it's ever been. Yeah, it went public at a valuation of$5 billion. It traded to$7 or$8 billion that day, and now it's at$21. But it peaked at$40. It's come down. I think Reddit is a good long-term hold. I just think, again, if you buy into this notion that eventually monetization catches up with attention, it's going to, I think it's a good long-term hold. Having said that, my general advice is the following, low-cost index funds, because nobody can pick stocks over the long-term and outperform the market.

14:09Even Warren Buffett will tell you that they were investing in an unusual time with a lack of information and the asymmetry of information or your ability to find alpha or stocks that were undervalued was much greater, the likelihood of doing that, than it is now. Warren Buffett, who is arguably the best investor in history, is telling people not to be stock pickers. So having said that, I believe that you can take 30 % or should take 30 % of your money and have some fun and invest in single stocks or single asset classes where you think you have some sort of insight or you believe that they're undervalued.

14:42And this might be that. What I would also suggest, though, is that two-thirds plus of your net worth is put in low cost index funds. And here's a bit of the wrinkle there. Make sure they're low cost index funds that aren't just solely focused on the U.S. The U.S. stock market is now at 98 % in terms of value, meaning it's only been more expensive on a PE ratio, 2 % of its history. European value stocks are in the bottom 2%, meaning they've been more expensive on a PE basis or traded at higher levels for 98 % of their history. This to me says to me that the markets or the rivers or flows of capital are about to reverse.

15:14That was one of my big predictions for 2025 is I think that non-U.S. markets are gonna outperform U.S. markets. Anyways, were you asked? I like Reddit. I think it's a nice long-term hold. But just be careful believing that me or anybody else can give you advice on single stock picking. We can't. You want to have some fun? You want to try and find some alpha? Have at it. But keep the bulk of your firepower, your dry powder for low-cost index funds that are diversified not only across the S &P, but across different geographies globally. Thanks for the question. We have one quick break And when we're back Speaking of Reddit We're diving into the depths Into the bowels of Reddit Buckle up

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17:48Welcome back. We asked and Reddit delivered. Let's bust right into it.

17:56All right. Armand8194 asks, Scott, something you used to preach is exclusivity as a great marketing tactic. No is the sexiest word in the English language. I always say that. But recently you've been releasing more and more podcast content. Can you reconcile the two? Yeah, so it's a fair point. And that is, and I worry about this a lot. So we had Pivot, then I launched Prof. G, then Prof. G Markets. Now we have Raging Moderates. So I'm like AOL in the 90s when you'd stick your hand in a cereal box and you'd pull out a seedy rum of AOL. I mean, it's like to resist is futile. and I do worry that the ubiquity of me, that people are gonna start to have a gag reflex.

18:37Like, oh Jesus, this guy again. So what I'm trying to do is create more enterprise value. What do I mean by that? So my co-host on Prof G Markets, Ed Elson, does the interviews now. My co-host on Raging Moderates, Jess, does all the interviews. So I'm only on about half of the episodes. We're about to go daily. Speaking of like too much of anything is not a good thing. We're about to go daily on Prof G Markets because the markets are daily. And I'm only going to be on twice a week. I'll do some like impromptu guest appearances. But what you're saying is absolutely true. I try and create scarcity across my speaking.

19:14I price my speaking fees at sort of an outrageous dollar amount because one, I don't want to work that hard and I only want to go to places I like. And two, pricing is a signal. So scarcity is key. I'm very cognizant of that. I try and take time off. One, because I'm lazy, but B. so my co-host on Pivot, Kara Swisher, does pretty much every episode. I take the month of August off. I take weeks off at a time. I'm doing a college tour with my son, and they said, we'll set you up for a moment. I'm like, no, you won't. Just find a guest host. So I think it's important to have a little bit of scarcity value, and I'm very cognizant of it, and quite frankly, you're right.

19:48I'm worried that at some point, I'm just going to dilute my brand equity, and it's just going to be too much, and people are going to get sick of dick jokes. I'm cognizant of it. Your theory goes to an important marketing theory, and that is the most profitable companies in history that have the greatest gross margins create the illusion of scarcity. I'm wearing a Panerai watch, which is$1 ,000 of movements, plastic, and glass that they charge$11 ,000 for because they've created this illusion that Panerais are scarce. They purposely constrict supply such that when you see the watch you want, they can honestly say, well, we only have one.

20:21We have artificially reduced the supply of freshman seats at elite universities. I'm cognizant of the fact that I might be moving myself from what is kind of a scarcity luxury brand to a mass brand. And I'm trying to ensure that it's just not too much Scott all the time through co-hosts and limiting or reducing some of my appearances. but you clearly have an instinct for marketing. And the illusion of scarcity is so important. In life, it's really important. In an interview, when you're interviewing with somebody, start asking them questions and act as if you're interviewing them and give them the impression that you might have another offer, that you are so good at what you do that you are interviewing them.

21:04Why? Because my human capital is scarce and a lot of people want to rent it. You don't want to be too available to potential romantic partners. You have to have lines that say, okay, this is unacceptable or don't be too available. Scarcity. Yeah, I think your instincts are right on. You want to maintain, again, any high margin product equals the illusion of scarcity. Thank you for the question. All right, next question. Scott, when you hear or come up with your dirty jokes, where is the line where you think, ooh, that is too far? Okay, so I am generally a profane or vulgar person, but there's a strategy behind it.

21:46And that is all strategy comes down to one question. What can we do that is really hard? Or put another way, what can we do that our competition can't do? Amazon and Netflix spend tens of billions of dollars on infrastructure and fulfillment and on content because their competitors can't because they don't have access to cheap capital. So they're like, okay, Netflix goes, if we spend$18 billion on content, Peacock just can't do it. Hulu can't do it. Disney Plus can't do it. Even HBO can't do it. And so that's where they go. And they focus on this kind of brute force spending strategy. Where I have decided to go in terms of trying to differentiate my podcast is quite frankly, one of the reasons I am really crude is that one, CNBC can't tell dick jokes.

22:35and I want to be known as provocative and profane. I also think that if you're funny and profane, it kind of softens the beach and people become more open to new ideas. Also, I want to appeal to younger people. And quite frankly, young men respond to my type of profanity. Sometimes I go too far. Sometimes I can hear myself, the words coming out and thinking, you know, that's a little bit much. I've had parents write in and say, I'd like to play this with my kids, but I've stopped because you're so crude. I've had CEOs call me and say, I would have sent this clip to the entire company, but I can't be seen or heard sending out something with this type of profanity.

23:13I also, my kind of heroes are comedians that were social commentators and were also really profane, whether it was Richard Pryor or Lenny Bruce, or I think Bill Burr is a genius. These guys are not afraid to be profane and vulgar. So one, it's genuine. I'm a profane and vulgar person. Two, I want to appeal to young men. I want my content to resonate with them such that the listened to some of the lessons I have about what I hope is a positive vision of masculinity. And also, just purely strategically, it is clear when you listen to the show, this is not your father's CNBC. Appreciate the question.

23:46And just so you know, the other day, I walked into my son's room to have the sex ed talk. And I walked in with a condom and a banana. And he said, what's the banana for? And I'm like, well, I can't get hard on an empty stomach. That's good. Thanks for the question. Hey, Scott. They say wealth typically lasts about three generations. Are you doing anything different in the way you are raising your children to prepare them for the advantages they will have entering the market and how to contextualize them? Are you even considering this as a concern or is it overblown? Oh no, it's a huge concern.