← The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Starting Businesses With Friends, Why We’re So Divided, and the Danger of Keeping Score in Relationships
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Close your eyes, listen to Monday.com feel the sensation of an AI work platform so flexible and intuitive it feels like it was built just for you. Now open your eyes, go to Monday.com, start for free, and finally breathe avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to don't know the difference between matte, paint, finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on the app. Download Today I'm Esteed Herndon and this week on Today Explained, I traveled to Minneapolis to speak with Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is suing the Trump administration over ICE descending on his state. It would mean that we had found federal active duty troops patrolling our streets, which is concerning because the way ICE does its business is been proven over and over again to be deeply problematic. New episodes of Today Explained drop every day of the week, wherever you get your podcasts, and you can now watch our Saturday interviews@YouTube.com Vox. Welcome to Office Hours with Prav 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. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to office hours@procymedia.com Again, that's officehoursopropertymedia.com or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit and we just might feature it in our next episode. First question Our first question comes from sillyemu8312 on Reddit they say everyone always says don't start a business with family and friends. What's your realistic opinion on this? For context, I own some multifamily real estate with one of my oldest friends and it's gone smoothly for over four years. Yeah, they say don't start businesses with the friends. I have always started businesses with friends friends. Although some of the businesses I've started, I've ended up becoming friends with the senior people in the company. But I have started businesses with friends. I started my first business with a good friend from business school. I started my business Profit with my friend Lee Lotus. So I violated that rule. And so I you know, look, I think it's situational. I think family is a different ball of wax. I'm not sure I'd ever want to work with my wife or my family. Because if things don't go well, it kind of ruins Thanksgiving. That's a lot of eggs in one basket. I know Michael and Cass Lazaro started coming to go Buddy Media, and I'm like a mar couple who works together. Jesus Christ. That's God. I can't imagine that. But I think starting a business with friends, I err on the side of. I think it's a good idea because one of the keys to partnerships is being generous. At some point, you're going to add more value to the business than your partner, and at some point they're going to add more value than you. The problem is you tend to inflate your own contribution and diminish theirs. And if you aren't generous with that person, you start complaining or bitching that you should be getting more and it creates tension. And you want to see a thriving small business go down the tubes really fast. That's when the partners start fighting. And sometimes people get therapists or coaches to help them negotiate stuff, which I think is a good ide idea. So I have a bias towards starting a business with a friend because you're naturally going to be, I think, a little bit more generous with each other. It makes the breakup harder because there's more emotion involved. But also at the outset, a general best practice is to outline what happens if this doesn't work with us. Can one person buy the other out? Like, kind of come up with a framework for, well, what happens if this isn't working? If one person wants to leave? If one person isn't happy with the other one? Like, what are we going to have a board of advisors to help us make decisions, or a board of directors, but sort of say, what do we do? Maybe up front if things get dicey or spicy with us? I don't think that's a bad idea. Having said that, I never did that. I just always kind of let the chips fall where they might. The same bias I have towards working with friends is working is not working with family. And granted, I've never done that. Now, the reason most people work with family is because they inherited an amazing business. I don't think Arthur Sulzberger, the CEO of the New York Times or the publisher, wanted to work with family. But the thing is, he wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the New York Times because he wasn't that talented a business person had he not been the nephew or the son or whatever it is. So occasionally a family business oftentimes just gets you to letter l economically Faster than working your ass off in going through A, B, C, D, et cetera. So sometimes second generation families involved with their business because it's quite frankly just a much better opportunity and it's unfortunately, I think really can be really stressful for some of the people. I always think it's a good idea if you're going to go into the family business to go to work for an outside corporation, improve yourself there and you have more respect when you go into the family business and you have better perspective, if you will, and also better life experience. I would just be worried to be in a business with my sister or I wouldn't have been in business with my dad. He was unemployed by the time he was 55 and my mom was a secretary. So I can't really relate to it. But I would just hate to have a bad day at work and not be getting with my partners and then have to go home and like eat with them or see them at Thanksgiving. I think that would be especially tough. But again, it's all situational. Set up an agreement or general parameters around what happens if it's not working. Maybe get a coach to help you work out problems if they pop up. Try and be really generous with one another. I have a bias against working with family and a bias towards working with friends. But again, it's all situational. Situational. Very much appreciate the question. Question number two. Question number two comes from Wadi on Reddit. They say we're becoming increasingly polarized as a society, especially when it comes to social and political matters. As a communicator on some of the largest stages in the world, both physical and digital. What is the most important thing you think regular people can do to try to facilitate better conversations on these and other topics? We're going to need a bigger boat. So a lot of our polarization is a function. It's multidimensional. One, gerrymandering. They must love their job so much that they're willing to pass all these Byzantine laws that gerrymander every district. So if you look at all the congressional districts they've been. They're like a fucking jigsaw puzzle. So what we end up with is an electoral system where the election isn't the general election, it's the primary. And in every primary, the people that turn out on the left are unions and crazy fucking hippies from the 60s and the people that turn out on the right are maga, or people who believe that, you know, vaccines are terrible and that, you know, everyone should be able to carry an AR15 to their third grade class. So we just keep sending crazier and crazier extremists to Washington who don't represent the three middle quintiles, which is 60% of America. So we're divided politically. More than anything, though, I don't think we're as divided personally as the people who are trying to divide us. Specifically technology that sees a profit incentive and polarizing us. Why? Because as soon as we figure out your politics, send you far left, far right, and then make you more sensitive and inspired and tickle your sensors when you know AOC destroys Ted Cruz. But if you're someone else, Ted Cruz destroys aoc, creates more comments, keeps you engaged. Enragement equals engagement, which equals more Nissan ads, which equals more shareholder value. So these algorithms have a vested interest in dividing us and elevating content. It's divisive because it gets the most engagement. And also, I think, generally speaking, people are anxious. They feel more economically anxious and more likely to be angry at one another. So we're divided politically, we're divided technologically online, where we're spending more and more time in an environment that divides us. If you go out in the real world, and this is the shame about AI, if AI were crawling the real world, it'd be a much better place because people in general are lovely. I live or did live in Delray beach, which was kind of a purple district. And I had a lot of friends that were Republicans. And, well, isn't that big of me? Isn't that big? Smell me? I have friends who are, what, a progressive? Like New Age man? Anyway, you gotta separate the person from the politics, in my view. And they're generally. Most people you find are generally good people just getting up, love their kids, wanna make a good living and like their country. But the problem is online has convinced us that our neighbor is the problem. And also we've taken on ideology's identity. What do I mean by that? This is from George Carlin. And that is the danger of taking on a religion or political philosophy as your ideology is. It becomes your identity. Or when you let it become your identity and you start judging other people on it, it's because you personally feel affronted or offended when someone questions your ideology, because it's not questioning your ideology, it's questioning you. It's not saying, oh, no, you are wrong about this, it's saying you're wrong. So I just think it's dangerous to attach your political ideology to yourself as an identity. So I quote, unquote, identify As a center left, I'm a right of center left Democrat. But it's not my identity and I don't want it to be and I don't want to. I'm trying really hard not to immediately kind of check up and think someone's an idiot because they start with their Republican talking points. And I have found it has unlocked a lot of relationships for me. I just have an easier time and I don't want to be that judgmental. So we're divided technologically, we're divided electorally and we're also, I think, anxious and looking for people to blame, especially young people who get radicalized online and then are served up content that says you're not to blame. Immigrants are to blame for your economic problems. We don't blame for your romantic problems. So I think there's a lot of factors at play dividing us. Some solutions 1. Turn down the heat. Personally, just be trying to show more grace. Don't engage in online. I don't, I don't respond to comments anymore. I just don't, I don't get in people's face. I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm a fucking old man now. I can show a little bit more grace and just be occasionally take some hit. If someone says something stupid or mean about me, I just let it go. It's okay. I'm going to be fine. Turn down the heat. When you see something you like or someone says something you like, try and show more grace. Put more good vibes out there. Compliment people, be nice to them. Vote for moderates, just sort of take down the heat. Vote for antitrust to break up big tech. Also, mandatory national service I think would go a long way. I think that we need to raise a generation of young people that love America more than they love their Republican or Democratic Party and see that people from different ethnic, income, sexual orientation, backgrounds, different communities are wonderful and that they're, they share more in common than their differences and that they find they have an easier time identifying with the flag than identifying with a political party. Israel and Singapore, lowest levels of young adult depression and they both have national service. Singapore, the most religiously diverse nation in the world. And the leader there appreciately saw the opportunity or the danger of ethnic violence. So he said everyone's got to serve in the army together and see what wonderful people live here in Singapore, regardless of their ethnicity or their religion. Thanks so much for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break.
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Support for the show comes from LinkedIn it's a shame when the best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong audience. Like imagine running an ad for cataract surgery on Saturday morning car cartoons or running a promo for this show on a video about Roblox or something. No offense to our Gen Alpha listeners, but that would be a waste of anyone's ad budget. So when you want to reach the right professionals, you can use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers according to their data. That's where it stands apart from other ad buys. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority, skills, company company revenue. All so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. That's why LinkedIn Ads boasts one of the highest B2B return on ad spend of all online ad networks.
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Seriously, all of them.
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Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com Scott that's LinkedIn.com Scott Terms and conditions apply.
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A lot of us have spent a lot of the last week watching videos of what's happening on the streets of Minneapolis and understanding what it is that we're seeing, but also what's real and what isn't and what's AI and who is taking these videos and how we're supposed to understand the source feels harder than ever. So this week on the vergecast we're talking about what's happening in Minneapolis, how information moves in an AI age and what it means to make sense sense of it all. All that plus what's new with the new TikTok, why everything feels like it's falling apart on TikTok and more on the Vergecast.
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Wherever you get podcasts. Welcome back onto our final question, which also comes from Reddit. Aria 10:10 asks hello. I've heard you mention keeping scorecards in relationships friendships. My question is how and why you decided to stop keeping scorecards and what helped change your mindset. Especially in modern times, we tend to default to approaching relationship relationships with a more transactional mindset and I really want to break out of this. So curious to hear more about your journey. Thanks for the question. Yeah, this was specific or situational or had to do with one relationship, and that is the relationship with my father. When I was 8 years old, my mom came home. My mom just disappeared for a couple weeks and my dad didn't tell me why. It was the 70s, you know. I remember being on the couch watching the Partridge Family. It's like my mom's been gone for two weeks and I just started sobbing on control. I'm at my dad's like, what's wrong? I'm like, where's Mom? Where's Mom? I just like dawned on me that Mom's not around. And my dad, I remember it's the first time I ever saw my dad, like fear in his eyes, like he didn't know what to do and how to handle an 8 year old, like sobbing uncontrollably on his couch. I think that's when he decided that my mom should come get me. And a few days later my mom showed up and said, pack your stuff, we're leaving. This wasn't exactly Brene Brown, Esther Perel, like child care and said, you know, we got to be out of here in 15 minutes. And I'm like, 15 minutes, I can't pack my. And she's like, we need to get out of here. Dad's gonna be home soon. I don't know if she was kidnapping me or just wanted to see my dad. I don't know what the fuck what's going on. Anyways, 8 years old and as is often the case, well, because my mom was taking care of me, I had a tendency to sanctify her and demonize my dad. And my dad didn't make our lives very nice. He was so extraordinarily cheap that we struggled economically. And that is as soon as my parents split, my dad went on to be upper middle class, and my mom and I immediately dove to the lower middle class, which was hard. And it wasn't. It was hard on me. Kids don't really need a lot of money. I was able, you know, 35 cents, an ABBA Zabba bar, and a Schwinn bike, and you kind of got everything you need. We didn't have streaming media or iPhones, but it was very hard on my mom. And when you're the only child, especially, I think, the only boy, that's probably only girls, you just absorb their anxiety. I remember my mom, like, coming home and my mom was like, on the floor sobbing because the vacuum cleaner broke. And I'm like, well, we can get it fixed. And she's like, we don't have the money to get it fixed. I was like, you're fucking nine years old. And you're like, okay, what can I do to get a paper route to get the vacuum fixed? So that economic anxiety that was a direct result of my dad being such a bastard, quite frankly, because he could have helped us, made me resent him. And it stuck with me. And as I got older again in college, I had no money, constantly stressed, constantly broke. Dad could have held me. And the bottom line is he didn't. And so I always resented him for that. And now, having said that, my dad was a kick in the ass. My dad was a ton of fun, funny, nice, smart. He did love me. He would make an effort. He'd be in town and he would take me to movies and stuff. So he did try. And when my mom passed away, I kind of. I think my resentment towards him grew. And I would go, I think, one time a year without speaking to him. And he didn't really know what was going on, but didn't have the presence to try and figure it out. And then I just sort of decided that I wanted to have my father, my life, and that I decided to focus on the good things. And rather than having a scorecard and thinking, okay, he did X amount. He gave me X amount of love. I'm only going to give him X amount of love. I said, well, what kind of son do I want to be? And the reality is I wanted to be a loving, generous son. And I was going to hold myself to that standard and just put away the scorecard. And that was such an enormous unlock for me because I think about what kind of boss do I want to be if I pay someone more than they're earning? I don't I used to think younger. That pisses me off. They worked here for a year. I paid them a shit ton of money and they added no fucking value. I hate that person now. It's like if you are a boss and people get more out of working for you than maybe you get out of them or you pay them above market, that's a win, that's a victory. If you're a better spouse to your. If it is really hard for your spouse to figure out ways to be as good to you as you are to them, that's a win. That's the whole fucking shooting match. That's what it means to have kids. I hope at some point my kids level up what I've done for them. It's going to take a while. I've invested a lot of my kids. I always tell them your negative surplus value. So approaching relationships from the mindset of always wanting to have surplus value and say, okay, what kind of boyfriend do I want to be? What kind of son do I want to be? What kind of employer do I want to be? What kind of investor do I want? I used to get mad at CEOs at companies I invest in lost money. Now I'm like, no, I want to be a. I want to be a magnanimous, generous, supportive person. I've been on the board of a lot of companies I'm investing in where they up and lost all my money. And I try to be. Now it's no problem. You're going to get back up. This is great. I went into this eyes wide open. Well done. Let me help you raise money for your next thing. That's the kind of guy I want to be. And I wasn't always that way. So decide what kind of person in every relationship, what kind of role do you want to play? And then hold yourself to that standard and put away the scorecard, because the scorecard is incorrect, it's not accurate, and you'll always be unhappy. Now, having said that, don't be a doormat. I shed relationships all the time on a regular basis. I decide I'm just not getting a lot out of this relationship and I do a slow fade. Is that wrong? Well, that's what I do. But just decide what kind of person you want to be in the relationship and hold yourself to hold yourself to that standard and just don't measure. Put the measuring stick and the scorecard away. You're just going to be much happier. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question please email a voice recording to officehousropertymedia.com that's officehoursopropertymedia.com or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit. I've got a subreddit. I've got a subreddit. I like that. And we just might feature it in an upcoming episode. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our associate producer is Laura Gennar. Cami Reek is our social producer. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from Propg Media.