Returning to the Office, Advice for the Mediocre, and Why Scott’s Still Bullish on America

Scott responds to a listener struggling with the return to five-day office life after years of working remotely. He then tackles a frank question: What advice does he have for the “mediocre”? Plus, is now the time to move to America or to stay away? Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to [email protected], or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:01Speaker 02

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• 1:31Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to Office Hours with Prop G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. What's happening? Today's a little different. We're coming to you on a Friday and starting next week, office hours will drop every Monday and Friday. Every Monday and Friday, starting next week. That's right. Twice a week, twice the questions, twice the very good or very bad or somewhat in the middle advice from Prop G. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voicemail recording to [email protected]. Again, that's [email protected]. The questions have been outstanding recently. Or post a question on the Scott Galloway subreddit and we just might feature it in our next episode. What a thrill. First question.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  Hey Prof G, love the pod. Thanks for all you do in support of young men. As a mom of two young boys, it's really opened my eyes and changed the way that I parent them. My question today is more so looking for some advice. We just got the news that our company is going back in office five days a week. I'm a little bit jarred because I've been fully remote for the last five years since COVID. And I guess I'm just looking for some encouragement, some upsides, because I have a longer commute now, less time with my kids, and I'm just feeling a little discouraged overall. But I know that you're in support

• 3:01Speaker 04

  of in-office time, so make me feel better.

• 3:06Scott Galloway?

  Anonymous, I think remote work is a disaster for young people. Pre-mating, pre-mentors, pre-friends. I think it's a fantastic place to find friends, mentors, and mates. Yeah, I said it, one in three relationships begins at work, and most of them are, you know, 99.9% of them are consensual. We have a tendency to immediately distill everything down to one big blob and think this is the right thing for everybody. I think if you're a care, what I'll call a care worker, and I think that should get its own classification, you're taking care of young kids, aging parents, or you're having some health struggles yourself, I think that corporations, smart corporations, should offer the benefit the same way they might offer a great, you know, parental leave program, or great health benefits, to say

• 3:48Scott Galloway?

  we are a caregiver organization in that we go out of our way to try and facilitate remote work for people who need to be home more. And also, they're going to make less money. And I think that's fine. I think that trade-off is worth it. And there's a lot of people such as yourself that I think would willingly make that trade-off. So my, I'm not here with a message of hope. It doesn't sound, it sounds like you've probably already gone to the organization and said, look, is there any way I could go to two or three days back in the office? For them to go from zero days a week and with someone with small children to five days a week, that seems a little rough. In my view, and I want to be clear, I think in office, I think the office is a feature, not a bug for young people. But as we age and we collect dogs and kids,

• 4:32Scott Galloway?

  and especially for those who are on the sandwich generation, that are caregivers, I think it's in society's best interest to encourage companies to give them more flexibility such that they can be at home, providing that caregiving. I apologize, I don't have anything more inspirational or no silver bullet here, other than to say, five days a week is a lot, if from zero to five. And you may want to think about and always be on the lookout for an organization that offers you circumstances that are a better fit for your specific situation. Appreciate the question. Question number two, our second question comes from reader 532 on Reddit. They say,

• 5:11Scott Galloway?

  Prop G, from teaching the upper crust at NYU to your podcast, much of your advice for young people is aimed at how to improve their personal brand, how to climb ladders, how to become well-educated economically, and secure dollars in society. But millions attend lower-tier colleges, and half of those graduate in the bottom half, and two-thirds of young adults don't go to college. A vast majority are just trying to navigate having a job, working for a paycheck, and might not possess that extra gear to thrive. Serious question, what advice do you have for the mediocre? Mediocre is a weird word. I call us the unremarkable. I was unremarkable growing up, didn't do well academically, didn't test well. But back then, America loved the unremarkable. And one of the things I would argue is the wrong trajectory for America, is that higher

• 5:54Scott Galloway?

  education in America is about helping the bottom 90, not identifying tax breaks and programs to make the top 10% the top 1%. And I feel like higher education is leading this downfall by deciding that we are there for the children of rich people, or for the freakishly remarkable. And I can prove to every one of us that 99% of us are not in the top 1%. So. In terms of, the first is, I think, is a cultural zeitgeist. We need to stop shaming people who don't go to college. I go to parties where someone will say, inevitably, a parent will say, "Well, I don't know if you heard, but Bobby's home from Tulane and is dropping out." And we all speak in hushed tones like the family has done something wrong, or that Bobby is mentally ill because he decided he didn't want to finish college.

• 6:37Scott Galloway?

  And I don't think that's the right approach. I think a lot of kids are just not cut out for college, especially a lot of young men. But if you look at what's happening, if you look at LinkedIn profiles in Germany and in the UK, 11% of the title is apprentice. I think we need more of an apprenticeship culture such that the vocational trades return. And by the way, this is not trying to reshape the economy. The economy has a lot of, I think there's something like, it's either 4 million or 7 million open jobs for vocational work. And these jobs pay good money. I just read that juniors in high school who take this one class in auto shop are making $55,000 to $70,000, even if they don't complete their senior year of high school. I think we need to stop fetishizing the college degree,

• 7:21Scott Galloway?

  put more pressure on colleges to lower their costs, and think more about programs that create more on-ramps for young people. Again, the number of people who have apprenticeship on their LinkedIn profiles in the United States is 3% to lift up young people. I also think it's a series of economic programs, whether it's a tax holiday for young people, getting rid of capital gains tax exemption, or mortgage interest rate tax exemption. There's no reason why people renting or making their money from salary are less noble than people who own stocks or own homes. That's just a transfer of wealth from young adults. We need to stop the transfer, give young people more hope. I would increase minimum wage to 25 bucks an hour. You know, like Lincoln said, "God must have loved the common man.

• 8:06Scott Galloway?

  He made so many of them." And also, I think that we need...

• 8:13Scott Galloway?

  I don't know, kind of more respect, if you will, for people who get up, work to live, not live to work, move to a lower cost, a lower cost region and lead good lives, you know, have their sport, have their church, or not, have their family and don't aspire to be ballers professionally. I think that's okay. What I would argue there was a lot of young people are unrealistic. They talk about wanting to be an influencer, make millions of dollars, or have huge cultural relevance, but don't really want to work that hard. And then they talk about the issue of balance. And what I've found is that if you want to be in the top 1% of anything, you're pretty much got to devote 10 or 20 years to it and little else. So I don't think

• 8:56Scott Galloway?

  there's, I think we need to stop shaming people who don't have college degrees, do a better job of creating aspiration around those jobs, recognize that living a good life modest means getting up, taking care of your family, being a good partner, being a good citizen, that there's real honor in that. And if you don't start a tech company or get options worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that's okay. Because my sense is that young people are not only suffering from this incredible transfer of wealth from young to old, fomented by old people who've figured out a way to vote themselves more money over and over and over. Average 70 year old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. Average person under the age of 40 is 24% less wealthy. But give young

• 9:39Scott Galloway?

  people a leg up economically so that they have more opportunity. I think all of these things add up to falling back in love with what you say is the mediocre, but I think it's the unremarkable have built this country. And I think we need to do a better job of nodding our head to how important the middle class is and the 99% of us who are not in the top 1%. Appreciate the question. We'll be right back after a quick break.

• 10:10Scott Galloway?

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• 10:55Scott Galloway?

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• 11:13Scott Galloway?

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• 11:58Scott Galloway?

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• 12:24Scott Galloway?

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• 13:09Scott Galloway?

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• 13:32Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Our final question comes from Reddit. User HollywoodKid350 asks, "Hey Scott, as a European, if given the chance, would you move to the US right now?" So, I moved to London three years ago. And a lot of people will naturally say, "Well, good, you know, a lot of my friends have progressed as well. Makes sense that you left." Or, "America right now is such a shit show, I can see why you left." I want to be clear, the reason I moved to Europe was not because of America or anything wrong with America, it was because of the prosperity I recognized because I was so fortunate to be born in America. I've recognized such incredible prosperity because of my brilliant decision to be born

• 14:17Scott Galloway?

  in America. I've always said a lot of my success is not my fault, it afforded me and my family the opportunity to do something for my kids. That I think is just a gift and that is to give them three or four years overseas. My parents are from here, so I've always felt a calling, always thought of myself as sort of the kind of guy that would live abroad for a few years and feel as if I'm running out of time. So boom, moved to London and it's been great. I am planning on moving back. One, because I absolutely love living in America and two, because I think it's time for people who are worried about what is going on in America to return home, not to leave, but to return home. And so to your question, I never miss an opportunity to virtue signal, would I move to the US right now? Yeah, I would. If you're already sort

• 15:01Scott Galloway?

  of tracking and moving into the latter part of your career and maybe in a little bit more of the spending part of your life, I would say stick in Europe. So a lot of it's your situation, your opportunities and where you are in your life. But generally speaking, if you're just an economic animal, I advise getting to the biggest city in your nation, getting to the biggest city in your continent, and then trying to figure out a way to get to the US. Because the US, you just don't count the US out. I am divesting out of the US in terms of the stock market, just because I think it's overvalued. But I'm bullish on America, just because I think the agility, the risk aggressiveness, the rule of law, the universities, the DNA, the opportunities in the US are just absolutely unrivaled in

• 15:43Scott Galloway?

  terms of professional opportunity and economic upside. And even if it doesn't work out, I don't think you'll regret it. I think very few people think, well, I fucked up moving to either America or Europe for a few years. And I think more people from Europe and other countries that move to the US decide that their prosperity is so much greater, the upside's so much greater, they decide to stay. In some, in some, come to the US.

• 16:08Scott Galloway?

  Okay, that's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to [email protected]. Again, that's [email protected]. 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.

• 16:30Speaker 05

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• 17:00Speaker 06

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way. Because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.