AI transcript
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Welcome to the PropG pods office hours.
This is the part of the show where we answer questions
about business big tech entrepreneurship
and whatever else is on your mind.
– Hey, PropG.
– Hey, Scott and team.
– Hey, Scott.
– Hi, PropG.
– Hey, PropG.
– Hey, PropG.
– Hi, Professor G.
– At last week’s office hours,
I answered your questions, or not,
surrounding AI and higher education,
the intersection of passion and talent,
and charitable giving.
What this will be, I think the biggest impact
this is gonna have on primary education,
is that ChatGPT and Anthropic will be able to offer
what are pretty reasonable facsimiles
of $150 an hour tutor for nearly free.
Look at the space you’re in and think,
am I learning a lot?
Am I learning a lot at this company?
Do I have senior level sponsorship?
Is the firm doing well?
Is it a good culture?
Do they pay me fairly?
Is there a path?
Has someone taken an irrational interest,
or at least a real interest in my future
and it’s coaching me?
All of these things are important to ask yourself
at a specific organization.
How do I approach giving?
I try to put it to something I’m passionate about
and I think I know something about
and that I want to change.
Today, we’ll answer your questions
about OpenAI’s recent content deals, Microsoft AI,
why I start off the pod with crew jokes
and what the dog’s morning routine looks like.
So with that, first question.
– Hi Scott, my name is Jack.
I live in Southern Delaware.
Thank you for the start off there.
Thank you for all the great content.
I learned a lot listening to you and your team.
Scott, on June 3rd, you and Ed,
we’re talking about some of the content deals
that OpenAI has made with Vox and News Corp.
No, I didn’t see them out in the headlines before.
Especially with News Corp, alarm bells went off in my head
and at a simple level, I kind of understand how it works.
And I know, as I’m sure you’re well aware,
two of the big AI issues are bias and hallucination,
hallucination and bias.
And then we have this technology,
which is still not rock solid, might never be rock solid,
hooking up with news organizations.
And I’m not just picking on News Corp here
that are known for bias.
Am I looking at this the wrong way, Scott?
I really would appreciate people’s thoughts on this
because when I heard about that deal,
like I said, alarm bells went off in my head.
– Okay, thanks again for all the great content
and hope you and your family are well.
Bye-bye.
– Thanks for the thoughtful question, Jack, from Delaware.
Yeah, it would make sense that if they started crawling,
I think that’s even what Elon Musk is trying to do
with his AI offering is to make it non-woke
because there is, I have noticed with Microsoft AI,
some people call it chat GBT.
And also Anthropic is they have put on,
I don’t wanna call it a woke filter,
but a more progressive or we don’t wanna offend people filter.
It’s not as hard-hitting, it feels more anodyne,
it feels more safe, it doesn’t feel as puncturing.
I mean, occasionally people say, okay,
DI makes no sense for the following reasons.
And I find that it’s center-left and it’s PG-13
and that they have created some sort of technology
or governor that attempts to kind of take it
a little bit more blue.
And I say that as a progressive
and a little bit more PG-13.
So I’m not worried that we’re gonna start seeing
kind of weird gossipy things that are clearly the post.
These LLMs crawl so much data
that I think the idea is that they see the relationship
between words across different sources
and then a string of words
and figure out what type of sequencing, if you will,
is most common across the sequence of the query
that you have put in.
If that sounds like a bad explanation of AI,
trust your instincts.
So a little bit about the contract.
According to the Wall Street Journal,
the five-year contract with Newscore
is valued at an estimated quarter of a billion dollars
or $250 million.
But when you break that down, that’s $50 million a year.
I don’t know if some of it’s coming,
if it’s all in cash or some of it’s in compute
or I don’t know, we’ll see.
It’s actually not that big a deal, I don’t think.
As part of the deal, OpenAI will be able to use
news material from Newscore’s publications,
including the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, New York Post
to answer questions from users.
So keep in mind, I actually think the Wall Street Journal
does call balls and strikes.
And strikingly, the Wall Street Journal and PBS,
was it the Wall Street Journal and PBS
or the Wall Street Journal and the BBC?
I think it was the Wall Street Journal and PBS.
Are seen as the two most unbiased news outlets,
which I found very interesting.
This isn’t, they’re not Crawling Fox News here.
So this does feel a little bit more,
I don’t know, nonpartisan, if you will.
And also the Wall Street Journal, I would argue,
that the editorial page has definitely a conservative bent,
but the newspaper itself,
I just think it’s great, great financial reporting.
Also Barron’s is very much markets focused.
But my sense is these things crawl so much data
that they are literally expect rating back,
something resembling a bit of an amalgam of all,
all of the world.
Now, having said that, where it’ll zero in on,
where it gets a bias is from the engineer,
and you are the engineer here,
specifically the prompt you put in.
Now, what I was worried about is that I would say,
okay, give me my morning news,
business news, give me the business news for this morning
in the voice of Reuters with a pinch of,
I don’t know, Anderson Cooper,
and with some humor from Dave Chappelle,
and I would never need to go to CNN,
and I would never need to go to Reuters,
and you’d even have more oxygen sucked out of the room
of media companies,
because they could start mimicking their voice
and not pay them any royalties.
Having said that, there’s been enough of these deals struck now
that it does look as if the AI industrial complex
has decided that they do need this content.
Now, can the LLMs then start, create,
or give birth to their own LLMs
that create artificial content that these LLMs can crawl?
Think about that, that’ll send your mind
into a bit of a ketamine rabbit hole.
Not that that’s a bad thing, anyways.
Or are they gonna constantly need to continue
to get the grist or the coal or the inputs
from new content from these media companies?
I hope it’s a ladder, and that’s what I’m banking on,
because you’re gonna end up with
a new high-margin source of revenue.
So for example, I was thinking about buying Gannett stock.
Why Gannett is being priced as if it’s going out of business,
I think it’s stock as a two or three bucks,
and it has a ton of content,
specifically local and regional content.
They own a bunch of local and regional newspapers,
and I thought, well, that actually, that content
is probably very attractive to an LLM that’s focused
or trying to put out, you know, be more informed
in terms of news, if you will.
Anyway, that’s neither good nor there.
So I’m excited about these deals.
So I’d like to see the prices go up.
I just did a call with, or I just did an interview
with Matt Bellamy of Puck News, who covers media,
and he was saying, what does Hollywood get wrong?
And I’m like, the writer’s strike just didn’t get it.
They’re going after the studios.
They should be partnering with the studios
to go after the LLMs and AI that want,
you can’t squeeze blood from a rock.
I mean, Disney doesn’t have that much money to give up,
but you wanna squeeze blood
from a giant frickin’ blue whale carcass,
which is AI right now.
Anyways, but supposedly there’s all this descent
and agita in the newsroom.
Why?
What creates more descent and agita in a marriage?
Financial problems.
And when companies are shrinking and have financial strain,
what do you know mom and dad start arguing?
And that’s what’s happening at the Washington Post
and what’s happening in media companies all over America
is that they are having arguments over money.
Thanks for the question, Jack from Delaware.
Question number two.
Hi Scott, this is Scott calling from Silicon.
Thanks for your podcast.
I listen to all four each week
and I have a question regarding your brand strategy.
You make two types of jokes at the beginning of the podcast
some Mondays and Thursdays, corny or crude.
The crude jokes are sometimes funny
to the mind of a 12 year old boy.
If you think I have the mind of a 12 year old boy,
trust your instincts.
Even with a 12 year old boy mindset, however,
the crude jokes are often not well received by me
and may not be well received
by your core group of young males.
By way of background,
I’m a 57 year old partner in an accounting firm
with 55 employees.
I would like to send out links to your podcast to our firm
but do not for two reasons.
First, I lead numerous employees
and I’m embarrassed by the inappropriate content
of the crude jokes.
Second, our practices in Washington state
where employment laws are stringent
and enforced by the legal community.
If I were to send out the podcast link to our employees,
it was possible that someone would be offended by the joke
and since it was received by his or her employer,
I could be accused of creating a hostile work environment.
My question is, why would you continue with the crude jokes
when you can stick with the corny jokes
for the same amount of work you and your team
are putting in to create the podcast?
And by doing so, you would create the opportunity
to expand your audience across genders and generations
and give the expanded audience the opportunity
to expand their knowledge, viewpoints
and improve their lives.
Thank you for creating content that is insightful,
meaningful and impactful.
I look forward to your answer
but I’m not looking forward to the next crude joke.
– That is a really thoughtful question.
Scott from Spokane, it is a gift when someone gives you
what I’ll call constructive criticism
or constructive feedback and this is exactly that.
It’s civil, it’s thoughtful and I want to be clear,
you may be right, I don’t know.
I mean, there’s a reason why people aren’t crude in media
because is it worth the risk of offending people
if the kind of the core or the white meat
of what you do is excellence or insight
or being funny generally about stuff,
then why do you need to go NC17?
I do it for a few reasons
and I don’t know if it’s the right way but it’s my way.
One, it’s authentic, I am crude and profane.
That is really me, that is how I think.
The corny jokes I like, I like dad jokes,
I find crude jokes really funny
and I think that there’s more people out there
that think like me than not.
They’re just been told in an overly sensitive environment
that they’re not supposed to say these things
and I get it.
A lot of this is NSFW and I want to be clear,
young men should not, anyone should not feel comfortable
repeating these things in a workplace.
I’m not even just saying this makes me think I should stop.
The way I justify it is that,
or at least I’ve rationalized it to myself,
is that one of the things I don’t like
about the Democratic Party and Progressives
is that we are seen as humorless
and that we are so worried about offending people
that people are turned off of us.
That we’ve become so ridiculous with our preferred pronouns
or rather than taking gestures as they’re intended
but looking instead trying to find something wrong
with someone’s comments, take them out of context
and then press on the soft tissue and shame them
hoping you’ll get a bunch of likes
and score a Guardians of Gotcha pin.
I want to create cloud cover for vulgarity and profanity,
not in the workplace but in media.
And one of the reasons I thought about seriously
stopping doing it is that I’ve had actually,
parents come up to me with their kids
and I think, Jesus, the kid is listening to this.
Maybe I shouldn’t, but anyways,
kids probably have more profanity than I would acknowledge.
But I want to take back profanity and vulgarity
from the right.
I think that it’s okay to be inappropriate
and joke.
You never want to diminish anybody.
You never want to make someone feel bad.
But look, if you don’t want to listen,
if you have that sort of sensibility
where you’re easily offended by vulgarity or crude jokes,
I get it, full refund coming your way.
And I want to be clear.
I don’t know if I’m right here
but I am intentional about being authentic
and to the people I admire, Lenny Bruce,
George Carlin, Dave Chappelle.
I just look at these folks
and I think of them as progressives
that really fomented or gave cloud cover
for social change by softening the beach
with humor that was quite frankly,
a not PG-13 that was unstarched and crude.
I enjoy Bill Maher.
I think he’s quite crude.
But this is something where the jury is out.
I don’t know.
I don’t know if I’m right here
and your thoughtful comments give me pause to learn
and maybe reconsider my view.
So in sum, the lesson here, the learning here
isn’t whether or not I should continue
or not continue to have crude jokes or be vulgar.
It’s that civil dialogue and civil pushback results
in learning if you’re open to it
and we should all be open to it.
We should all approach these issues
with a little bit of humility
and that is I am open to the idea that I might be wrong.
Anyways, a long-winded way of saying
I really appreciate the question.
Thanks very much, Scott from Spokane.
We have one quick break before our final question.
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Welcome back, question number three.
Hey Scott, I’m curious about role in meditation,
journaling and morning routines playing your life, if any.
Thanks for all you do.
So I wake up about 5 a.m., I do a cold plunge,
and then I review my journaling from the evening before,
and then I do a bunch of breath work,
and then I work out, I do a bunch of yoga,
and then I do about an hour to an hour and a half of meditation.
None of that is true.
The role of meditation, journaling and morning routines in my life,
they play almost no role, why?
Because I go to sleep around 2 or 3 a.m.
I like to write, I like to hang out with my dogs,
I like to surf the internet, I like to watch television,
I like to call my friends on the east and west coast,
back in the United States,
and I like to hang out without anybody except my dogs,
and my brain, sometimes I have a drink,
sometimes I take an edible, I’m not drinking as much,
I’m trying to cut down my alcohol intake,
but that is me time, that is me time.
And what does it mean when you go to bed at 2 or 3 a.m.?
It means you get up, I usually get up around 9 or 10,
but I don’t really get going to about 10, 30 or 11,
and this fits really well, this time zone,
because nobody that works with me is up until noon my time, if that.
Plus I work with all these millennials who are probably walking their dog
in Prospect Park until about 11 a.m. after getting their $43 coffees.
Is that wrong? Is that a stereotype?
Is that a stereotype?
My morning routine is I get up, I have coffee,
I read a bunch of news, I hang out with the dogs again.
If I’m really motivated, I’ll do some exercise, sometimes I put it off.
I try and work out about four times a week,
I’ve worked out four times a week for about, I don’t know, about 40 years.
It is my antidepressant.
But for me, it’s really about taking in information.
It’s not entertainment time for me, but it’s about coffee.
It’s about trying to have a nice breakfast.
I hang out a little bit with my partner, catch up with her,
and then just sort of ease into the day, if you will.
But for me, it’s about digesting a ton of information,
and then, you know, America wakes up around 7 a.m.
and I kind of start my work day, and I usually, like right now,
it is 7 p.m. I’ll be working until 9 p.m. tonight,
and all hell breaks loose around noon,
and my calendar’s just kind of stacked.
But when I was in college, I rode crew,
and I had to get up at 5.15 every morning,
and then bomb to Marina Del Rey, where I would row,
and I think it was called Bologna Creek for 5 or 7 miles.
By the way, hands down, the worst athlete in all of D1 sports
you’re listening to right now.
And usually, I had gotten fucked up the night before
with my fraternity brothers,
and so I would row for about a mile and a half,
and then throw up over the side,
and everyone would freak out and say shit like,
“Well, that’s not going to make the boat go faster.”
“Who threw up?”
“Well, it must be Galloway.”
And I was like, “These people are so uptight.”
I’m like, “Come on, none of us are going to the Olympics.”
Anyway, see above, worst D1 athlete in UCLA history.
But I decided after I left crew
that I would never get up early again in my life
if I could help it,
and two, I would never get my heart rate above 100 beats per minute.
I am so over cardiovascular exercise.
I was like a giant fucking vein.
I was 6’2″, I was like 6’2″, 185, 190.
I’ve been basically the same weight for 40 years,
although it shifted.
It shifted.
Now, I have enormous ankles.
Why does that make me laugh?
I don’t know.
Anyways, I decided I wanted nothing to do with cardio.
I wanted nothing to do with the mornings.
I am not a morning person.
I would like to figure out meditation.
My friend Sam Harris is kind of the gooey around the stuff.
I’m sure it’s good for you.
By the way, see above, I’m not sure this is the right way.
It’s just my way.
Daddy is not a morning person.
He is not a morning person.
Oh, he loves the evening.
I think that’s why I moved to New York, seriously.
California is all about the day.
New York is all about the night, and boom.
As soon as I went back to New York, and it was like a Wednesday,
and there were great places to go at 11 p.m.,
I’m like, “Hello.
Hello.
Count me.
Count me in.
Count me.
New York, here I come.”
Anyways, don’t love the mornings.
Don’t love the mornings.
The good news is in Britain is that the mornings are really gray,
and you feel as if you’re missing apps of fucking literally nothing
by just being at home, nestled around your coffee.
Thanks to the question, not a morning person.
Not a morning person.
That’s all for this episode.
If you’d like to submit a question,
please e-mail a voice recording to OfficeHours@PropjiMedia.com.
Again, that’s OfficeHours@PropjiMedia.com.
This episode was produced by Caroline Shagren.
Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer,
and Drew Burroughs is our technical director.
Thank you for listening to The Propji Pod
from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice,
as read by George Hahn.
And please follow our Propji Markets Pod
wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.
Please, if you can, right now, and you enjoyed the show,
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Atlassian software like Jira, Confluence, and Loom
help power the collaboration needed for teams
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Because individually, we’re great,
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That’s why millions of teams around the world,
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trust Atlassian software for everything
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Atlassian software is built to help keep you connected
and moving together as one.
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That’s A-T-L-A-S-S-I-A-N.com.
Atlassian.
Support for PropG comes from Vanta.
Building a business, achieving SOC2,
where ISO 27001 compliance can help you in bigger deals,
enter new markets, and deepen trust with customers,
but can also cost you real time and money.
Vanta automates up to 90% of the work
for the most in-demand frameworks,
helping businesses get compliant quickly.
And with over 300 integrations,
you can easily monitor and secure the tools
your business relies on.
Join over 6,000 fast-growing companies
that use Vanta to manage risk,
improve security, and real-time.
Get $1,000 off Vanta by going to vanta.com/profg.
That’s V-A-N-T-A.com/profg.
Welcome to the PropG pods office hours.
This is the part of the show where we answer questions
about business big tech entrepreneurship
and whatever else is on your mind.
– Hey, PropG.
– Hey, Scott and team.
– Hey, Scott.
– Hi, PropG.
– Hey, PropG.
– Hey, PropG.
– Hi, Professor G.
– At last week’s office hours,
I answered your questions, or not,
surrounding AI and higher education,
the intersection of passion and talent,
and charitable giving.
What this will be, I think the biggest impact
this is gonna have on primary education,
is that ChatGPT and Anthropic will be able to offer
what are pretty reasonable facsimiles
of $150 an hour tutor for nearly free.
Look at the space you’re in and think,
am I learning a lot?
Am I learning a lot at this company?
Do I have senior level sponsorship?
Is the firm doing well?
Is it a good culture?
Do they pay me fairly?
Is there a path?
Has someone taken an irrational interest,
or at least a real interest in my future
and it’s coaching me?
All of these things are important to ask yourself
at a specific organization.
How do I approach giving?
I try to put it to something I’m passionate about
and I think I know something about
and that I want to change.
Today, we’ll answer your questions
about OpenAI’s recent content deals, Microsoft AI,
why I start off the pod with crew jokes
and what the dog’s morning routine looks like.
So with that, first question.
– Hi Scott, my name is Jack.
I live in Southern Delaware.
Thank you for the start off there.
Thank you for all the great content.
I learned a lot listening to you and your team.
Scott, on June 3rd, you and Ed,
we’re talking about some of the content deals
that OpenAI has made with Vox and News Corp.
No, I didn’t see them out in the headlines before.
Especially with News Corp, alarm bells went off in my head
and at a simple level, I kind of understand how it works.
And I know, as I’m sure you’re well aware,
two of the big AI issues are bias and hallucination,
hallucination and bias.
And then we have this technology,
which is still not rock solid, might never be rock solid,
hooking up with news organizations.
And I’m not just picking on News Corp here
that are known for bias.
Am I looking at this the wrong way, Scott?
I really would appreciate people’s thoughts on this
because when I heard about that deal,
like I said, alarm bells went off in my head.
– Okay, thanks again for all the great content
and hope you and your family are well.
Bye-bye.
– Thanks for the thoughtful question, Jack, from Delaware.
Yeah, it would make sense that if they started crawling,
I think that’s even what Elon Musk is trying to do
with his AI offering is to make it non-woke
because there is, I have noticed with Microsoft AI,
some people call it chat GBT.
And also Anthropic is they have put on,
I don’t wanna call it a woke filter,
but a more progressive or we don’t wanna offend people filter.
It’s not as hard-hitting, it feels more anodyne,
it feels more safe, it doesn’t feel as puncturing.
I mean, occasionally people say, okay,
DI makes no sense for the following reasons.
And I find that it’s center-left and it’s PG-13
and that they have created some sort of technology
or governor that attempts to kind of take it
a little bit more blue.
And I say that as a progressive
and a little bit more PG-13.
So I’m not worried that we’re gonna start seeing
kind of weird gossipy things that are clearly the post.
These LLMs crawl so much data
that I think the idea is that they see the relationship
between words across different sources
and then a string of words
and figure out what type of sequencing, if you will,
is most common across the sequence of the query
that you have put in.
If that sounds like a bad explanation of AI,
trust your instincts.
So a little bit about the contract.
According to the Wall Street Journal,
the five-year contract with Newscore
is valued at an estimated quarter of a billion dollars
or $250 million.
But when you break that down, that’s $50 million a year.
I don’t know if some of it’s coming,
if it’s all in cash or some of it’s in compute
or I don’t know, we’ll see.
It’s actually not that big a deal, I don’t think.
As part of the deal, OpenAI will be able to use
news material from Newscore’s publications,
including the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, New York Post
to answer questions from users.
So keep in mind, I actually think the Wall Street Journal
does call balls and strikes.
And strikingly, the Wall Street Journal and PBS,
was it the Wall Street Journal and PBS
or the Wall Street Journal and the BBC?
I think it was the Wall Street Journal and PBS.
Are seen as the two most unbiased news outlets,
which I found very interesting.
This isn’t, they’re not Crawling Fox News here.
So this does feel a little bit more,
I don’t know, nonpartisan, if you will.
And also the Wall Street Journal, I would argue,
that the editorial page has definitely a conservative bent,
but the newspaper itself,
I just think it’s great, great financial reporting.
Also Barron’s is very much markets focused.
But my sense is these things crawl so much data
that they are literally expect rating back,
something resembling a bit of an amalgam of all,
all of the world.
Now, having said that, where it’ll zero in on,
where it gets a bias is from the engineer,
and you are the engineer here,
specifically the prompt you put in.
Now, what I was worried about is that I would say,
okay, give me my morning news,
business news, give me the business news for this morning
in the voice of Reuters with a pinch of,
I don’t know, Anderson Cooper,
and with some humor from Dave Chappelle,
and I would never need to go to CNN,
and I would never need to go to Reuters,
and you’d even have more oxygen sucked out of the room
of media companies,
because they could start mimicking their voice
and not pay them any royalties.
Having said that, there’s been enough of these deals struck now
that it does look as if the AI industrial complex
has decided that they do need this content.
Now, can the LLMs then start, create,
or give birth to their own LLMs
that create artificial content that these LLMs can crawl?
Think about that, that’ll send your mind
into a bit of a ketamine rabbit hole.
Not that that’s a bad thing, anyways.
Or are they gonna constantly need to continue
to get the grist or the coal or the inputs
from new content from these media companies?
I hope it’s a ladder, and that’s what I’m banking on,
because you’re gonna end up with
a new high-margin source of revenue.
So for example, I was thinking about buying Gannett stock.
Why Gannett is being priced as if it’s going out of business,
I think it’s stock as a two or three bucks,
and it has a ton of content,
specifically local and regional content.
They own a bunch of local and regional newspapers,
and I thought, well, that actually, that content
is probably very attractive to an LLM that’s focused
or trying to put out, you know, be more informed
in terms of news, if you will.
Anyway, that’s neither good nor there.
So I’m excited about these deals.
So I’d like to see the prices go up.
I just did a call with, or I just did an interview
with Matt Bellamy of Puck News, who covers media,
and he was saying, what does Hollywood get wrong?
And I’m like, the writer’s strike just didn’t get it.
They’re going after the studios.
They should be partnering with the studios
to go after the LLMs and AI that want,
you can’t squeeze blood from a rock.
I mean, Disney doesn’t have that much money to give up,
but you wanna squeeze blood
from a giant frickin’ blue whale carcass,
which is AI right now.
Anyways, but supposedly there’s all this descent
and agita in the newsroom.
Why?
What creates more descent and agita in a marriage?
Financial problems.
And when companies are shrinking and have financial strain,
what do you know mom and dad start arguing?
And that’s what’s happening at the Washington Post
and what’s happening in media companies all over America
is that they are having arguments over money.
Thanks for the question, Jack from Delaware.
Question number two.
Hi Scott, this is Scott calling from Silicon.
Thanks for your podcast.
I listen to all four each week
and I have a question regarding your brand strategy.
You make two types of jokes at the beginning of the podcast
some Mondays and Thursdays, corny or crude.
The crude jokes are sometimes funny
to the mind of a 12 year old boy.
If you think I have the mind of a 12 year old boy,
trust your instincts.
Even with a 12 year old boy mindset, however,
the crude jokes are often not well received by me
and may not be well received
by your core group of young males.
By way of background,
I’m a 57 year old partner in an accounting firm
with 55 employees.
I would like to send out links to your podcast to our firm
but do not for two reasons.
First, I lead numerous employees
and I’m embarrassed by the inappropriate content
of the crude jokes.
Second, our practices in Washington state
where employment laws are stringent
and enforced by the legal community.
If I were to send out the podcast link to our employees,
it was possible that someone would be offended by the joke
and since it was received by his or her employer,
I could be accused of creating a hostile work environment.
My question is, why would you continue with the crude jokes
when you can stick with the corny jokes
for the same amount of work you and your team
are putting in to create the podcast?
And by doing so, you would create the opportunity
to expand your audience across genders and generations
and give the expanded audience the opportunity
to expand their knowledge, viewpoints
and improve their lives.
Thank you for creating content that is insightful,
meaningful and impactful.
I look forward to your answer
but I’m not looking forward to the next crude joke.
– That is a really thoughtful question.
Scott from Spokane, it is a gift when someone gives you
what I’ll call constructive criticism
or constructive feedback and this is exactly that.
It’s civil, it’s thoughtful and I want to be clear,
you may be right, I don’t know.
I mean, there’s a reason why people aren’t crude in media
because is it worth the risk of offending people
if the kind of the core or the white meat
of what you do is excellence or insight
or being funny generally about stuff,
then why do you need to go NC17?
I do it for a few reasons
and I don’t know if it’s the right way but it’s my way.
One, it’s authentic, I am crude and profane.
That is really me, that is how I think.
The corny jokes I like, I like dad jokes,
I find crude jokes really funny
and I think that there’s more people out there
that think like me than not.
They’re just been told in an overly sensitive environment
that they’re not supposed to say these things
and I get it.
A lot of this is NSFW and I want to be clear,
young men should not, anyone should not feel comfortable
repeating these things in a workplace.
I’m not even just saying this makes me think I should stop.
The way I justify it is that,
or at least I’ve rationalized it to myself,
is that one of the things I don’t like
about the Democratic Party and Progressives
is that we are seen as humorless
and that we are so worried about offending people
that people are turned off of us.
That we’ve become so ridiculous with our preferred pronouns
or rather than taking gestures as they’re intended
but looking instead trying to find something wrong
with someone’s comments, take them out of context
and then press on the soft tissue and shame them
hoping you’ll get a bunch of likes
and score a Guardians of Gotcha pin.
I want to create cloud cover for vulgarity and profanity,
not in the workplace but in media.
And one of the reasons I thought about seriously
stopping doing it is that I’ve had actually,
parents come up to me with their kids
and I think, Jesus, the kid is listening to this.
Maybe I shouldn’t, but anyways,
kids probably have more profanity than I would acknowledge.
But I want to take back profanity and vulgarity
from the right.
I think that it’s okay to be inappropriate
and joke.
You never want to diminish anybody.
You never want to make someone feel bad.
But look, if you don’t want to listen,
if you have that sort of sensibility
where you’re easily offended by vulgarity or crude jokes,
I get it, full refund coming your way.
And I want to be clear.
I don’t know if I’m right here
but I am intentional about being authentic
and to the people I admire, Lenny Bruce,
George Carlin, Dave Chappelle.
I just look at these folks
and I think of them as progressives
that really fomented or gave cloud cover
for social change by softening the beach
with humor that was quite frankly,
a not PG-13 that was unstarched and crude.
I enjoy Bill Maher.
I think he’s quite crude.
But this is something where the jury is out.
I don’t know.
I don’t know if I’m right here
and your thoughtful comments give me pause to learn
and maybe reconsider my view.
So in sum, the lesson here, the learning here
isn’t whether or not I should continue
or not continue to have crude jokes or be vulgar.
It’s that civil dialogue and civil pushback results
in learning if you’re open to it
and we should all be open to it.
We should all approach these issues
with a little bit of humility
and that is I am open to the idea that I might be wrong.
Anyways, a long-winded way of saying
I really appreciate the question.
Thanks very much, Scott from Spokane.
We have one quick break before our final question.
Stay with us.
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You raise your glass to another guest
because you both know the holidays just beginning.
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Welcome back, question number three.
Hey Scott, I’m curious about role in meditation,
journaling and morning routines playing your life, if any.
Thanks for all you do.
So I wake up about 5 a.m., I do a cold plunge,
and then I review my journaling from the evening before,
and then I do a bunch of breath work,
and then I work out, I do a bunch of yoga,
and then I do about an hour to an hour and a half of meditation.
None of that is true.
The role of meditation, journaling and morning routines in my life,
they play almost no role, why?
Because I go to sleep around 2 or 3 a.m.
I like to write, I like to hang out with my dogs,
I like to surf the internet, I like to watch television,
I like to call my friends on the east and west coast,
back in the United States,
and I like to hang out without anybody except my dogs,
and my brain, sometimes I have a drink,
sometimes I take an edible, I’m not drinking as much,
I’m trying to cut down my alcohol intake,
but that is me time, that is me time.
And what does it mean when you go to bed at 2 or 3 a.m.?
It means you get up, I usually get up around 9 or 10,
but I don’t really get going to about 10, 30 or 11,
and this fits really well, this time zone,
because nobody that works with me is up until noon my time, if that.
Plus I work with all these millennials who are probably walking their dog
in Prospect Park until about 11 a.m. after getting their $43 coffees.
Is that wrong? Is that a stereotype?
Is that a stereotype?
My morning routine is I get up, I have coffee,
I read a bunch of news, I hang out with the dogs again.
If I’m really motivated, I’ll do some exercise, sometimes I put it off.
I try and work out about four times a week,
I’ve worked out four times a week for about, I don’t know, about 40 years.
It is my antidepressant.
But for me, it’s really about taking in information.
It’s not entertainment time for me, but it’s about coffee.
It’s about trying to have a nice breakfast.
I hang out a little bit with my partner, catch up with her,
and then just sort of ease into the day, if you will.
But for me, it’s about digesting a ton of information,
and then, you know, America wakes up around 7 a.m.
and I kind of start my work day, and I usually, like right now,
it is 7 p.m. I’ll be working until 9 p.m. tonight,
and all hell breaks loose around noon,
and my calendar’s just kind of stacked.
But when I was in college, I rode crew,
and I had to get up at 5.15 every morning,
and then bomb to Marina Del Rey, where I would row,
and I think it was called Bologna Creek for 5 or 7 miles.
By the way, hands down, the worst athlete in all of D1 sports
you’re listening to right now.
And usually, I had gotten fucked up the night before
with my fraternity brothers,
and so I would row for about a mile and a half,
and then throw up over the side,
and everyone would freak out and say shit like,
“Well, that’s not going to make the boat go faster.”
“Who threw up?”
“Well, it must be Galloway.”
And I was like, “These people are so uptight.”
I’m like, “Come on, none of us are going to the Olympics.”
Anyway, see above, worst D1 athlete in UCLA history.
But I decided after I left crew
that I would never get up early again in my life
if I could help it,
and two, I would never get my heart rate above 100 beats per minute.
I am so over cardiovascular exercise.
I was like a giant fucking vein.
I was 6’2″, I was like 6’2″, 185, 190.
I’ve been basically the same weight for 40 years,
although it shifted.
It shifted.
Now, I have enormous ankles.
Why does that make me laugh?
I don’t know.
Anyways, I decided I wanted nothing to do with cardio.
I wanted nothing to do with the mornings.
I am not a morning person.
I would like to figure out meditation.
My friend Sam Harris is kind of the gooey around the stuff.
I’m sure it’s good for you.
By the way, see above, I’m not sure this is the right way.
It’s just my way.
Daddy is not a morning person.
He is not a morning person.
Oh, he loves the evening.
I think that’s why I moved to New York, seriously.
California is all about the day.
New York is all about the night, and boom.
As soon as I went back to New York, and it was like a Wednesday,
and there were great places to go at 11 p.m.,
I’m like, “Hello.
Hello.
Count me.
Count me in.
Count me.
New York, here I come.”
Anyways, don’t love the mornings.
Don’t love the mornings.
The good news is in Britain is that the mornings are really gray,
and you feel as if you’re missing apps of fucking literally nothing
by just being at home, nestled around your coffee.
Thanks to the question, not a morning person.
Not a morning person.
That’s all for this episode.
If you’d like to submit a question,
please e-mail a voice recording to OfficeHours@PropjiMedia.com.
Again, that’s OfficeHours@PropjiMedia.com.
This episode was produced by Caroline Shagren.
Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer,
and Drew Burroughs is our technical director.
Thank you for listening to The Propji Pod
from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice,
as read by George Hahn.
And please follow our Propji Markets Pod
wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.
Please, if you can, right now, and you enjoyed the show,
go to Propji Markets and subscribe.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Scott speaks about News Corp’s deal with OpenAI and whether we should worry about it. He then responds to a listener’s constructive criticism regarding his crude jokes. He wraps up by sharing why he isn’t a morning person.
Music: https://www.davidcuttermusic.com / @dcuttermusic
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