Podbit · Pivot
Scott Galloway paid $7,000 total in tuition across 7 years at UCLA — undergrad and grad school combined — arrived with $300 and an old VW Rabbit, and graduated with just $15,000 in debt. He credits California taxpayers for making him who he is today. That story is becoming impossible at elite private schools.
Where this was said
At 1:07:50 · chapter starts 1:02:10
The wins and fails segment brings the episode's loosest and most entertaining exchange. Kara opens with a genuine win: domestic box office crossed $1 billion last month, the first time since before COVID, driven by the Michael Jackson biopic, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and a slate of YouTube-origin projects — all without a Marvel tentpole. Her fail is the 60 Minutes saga, crystallised in the delicious detail that when Nick Bilton was being grilled by Scott Pelley and finally fled the meeting, his parting shot was 'Enjoy the bagels!' — now apparently being printed on secret staff T-shirts. Scott's win is the surge in public university applications: UT Austin up 25% to 90,000 applicants, [2] — Scott Galloway "UT Austin application surge: The University of Texas at Austin received more than 90,000 applications, up 25% year-on-year, as families shi…" 1:06:00 UCLA drawing 160,000, and similar records at Virginia, Michigan, UNC, and UC San Diego. He frames it as a market correction — families are finally pricing elite private schools as luxury goods and realising that public flagships deliver comparable employers, alumni networks, and graduate school access at a fraction of the cost. He closes with his own origin story: $7,000 in total UCLA tuition across seven years, $300 in his pocket, no money, student jobs, and $15,000 in debt at graduation. Scott's fail is Ferrari's new electric car: the combustion engine isn't a feature, it's the product, and nobody buys a Ferrari for efficiency. An electric Ferrari, he argues, is a very expensive appliance — the equivalent of Rolex launching a smartwatch.
Domestic box office crossed $1 billion last month, a number not seen since before COVID and achieved without a Marvel movie.
UT Austin got 90,000 applications — up 25% in a year. UCLA gets 160,000. Public flagship universities are surging in demand as families finally realize that elite private schools are luxury goods pretending to be investments. The new dream: get rejected by Harvard, go to Michigan, save $250,000, buy a house.
The University of Texas at Austin received more than 90,000 applications, up 25% year-on-year, as families shift toward public flagship universities.
UCLA receives 160,000 applications — the population of a small city — making it the most applied-to campus in the University of California system.
Scott Galloway paid a total of $7,000 in tuition across 5 years of undergrad and 2 years of graduate school at UCLA.
Nobody buys a Ferrari for efficiency. They buy it for the irrational engine noise that triggers something primal. Scott Galloway calls the new electric Ferrari one of the great brand mistakes of 2026 — the equivalent of Rolex launching a smartwatch or Maker's Mark selling bottled water.
A baseball-playing junior who learned about compound interest now wants to quit the sport to start working and investing. George says let him decide and own it. Jade says team sports build something a job can't replace — try doing both during off-season first before making the call permanent.
May is 33, carries $69K in combined household debt, and wants to spend 11–13 years training to become a forensic pathologist at $14K/year in tuition. The prerequisite is non-negotiable: zero debt before a single class. Then, with the spouse earning $4,500/month and able to run the household debt-free, cash-flowing medical school is genuinely possible.
Kavak launched the Jedi Academy, an internal program where every employee — from CEO to mechanics — completes a 6-week training and ships a production-ready AI agent. The message to staff was blunt: train and adapt, or this may not be the right place for you.
The worst AI outcome for young people isn't cheating on homework. It's that passive, mindless consumption strips away the motivation and agency their brains need to develop. The second worst outcome is banning AI from classrooms entirely. The winning path is giving students AI-powered agency.
Prompting AI effectively is a skill that should be taught in K-12. The best prompter in history? Socrates. His method of relentlessly asking precise questions to uncover truth is exactly what powerful AI interaction looks like — and schools should explicitly teach it.
When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, Fei-Fei Li's first move was to email her child's elementary school principal and offer to lecture teachers and students. No investor or tech company did that. Teachers are scared, forgotten, and lectured at — and if they're not helped, neither are the kids.
After the KSI show exposed how hard physical comedy really is, Andrew Santino sincerely proposed doing a semester at clown school in France. Bobby agreed. This is apparently a real plan.
K-12 schools ask students to sit still, raise their hand, use fine motor skills, and be pleasers — behaviors that describe girls more than boys. Boys are twice as likely to be suspended for the same behavior, and five times as likely if they're Black. The system needs male teachers, national service, and kindergarten starting at 6 for boys.
Sunk costs are gifts from your former self — and like all gifts, you're allowed to decline them. Godin reframes every stuck-due-to-sunk-cost situation as a single question: knowing what you know now, would you choose this again?
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