How the Prof G Pod Gets Made, What Does It Mean to Be Rich? and What Really Matters in Hiring

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1:13Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. 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. Just a reminder, you can now catch Office Hours every Monday and Friday. That's two episodes a week, Monday and Friday. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehoursofproptmedia.com.

1:50Again, that's officehoursofproptmedia.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 Mission Alt 99 on Reddit. They ask, I'd love to learn more about how you produce all the podcasts from selecting guests, scheduling pre-production to post-production of each episode. How is the team structured for Prop G? And how do you think about producing a high volume of content across brands? Basically, when the recording session ends, what happens next? Okay, so I'll go through some of the tactics and then I'll speak to more kind of big picture issues.

2:32We put out, why don't we put out, I don't know, 12 or 14 podcasts a week. Our podcast universe is Pivot, which is with my co-host Kara Swisher. Vox owns the IP there, so we can't take it and go somewhere else. And then I started a portfolio podcast. There's Prof G, which is this. So the adjuncts of Prof G are the following. Prof G Conversations, which is generally a long-form interview. Prof G Markets, which is with my co-host Ed Elson. We specifically talk about the markets and stocks. Prof G Raging Moderates, which is a political podcast associated with Jessica Tarloff. Office Hours, which is my favorite, which is this, where people just write in and we try to give them unfiltered no mercy, no malice advice or responses to their questions.

3:20And then no mercy, no malice, which is George Hahn reading over my newsletter that I put out every Friday. We get a lot of inbound inquiry to be on the show because we've aggregated a fairly large audience and we tend to hit young, wealthy men who are impossible to reach because they're all avoiding commercials by being on Netflix and Spotify. So the great white rhino of the consumer economy and then the election is our audience. Our audience is the average is a 34-year-old male who makes$150 ,000 a year. That is, quite frankly, a baller. That is somebody that brands want to reach because they're in their mating years and spending money on stupid shit like coffee and watches and shoes and, I don't know, SaaS-based software because they want to be more attractive to mates or get promoted or scale their business.

4:06We're pretty, are we ruthless around guests? We want to find guests that are, we like famous people, yes, but more than that, we're trying to find people that other people haven't heard of before. So I really, I love when we find an interesting young person who who, so Kyla Scanlon, the economist on TikTok, this, I think she's like 26, reminds me, Ed, I think she's fantastic. So we bring her on regularly. Alice Hahn, this China analyst from Green Mantle. I think she's just a huge find. We've had her on three times now. So Aswath Damodaran, who's probably been on more than anyone else. I just think he's fascinating.

4:42And I don't know if you know Aswath, he's a colleague at NYU, but he's the best, hands down the best teacher there, maybe one of the best teachers in the world. So I would rather find someone that people don't know, then when people come on, some famous CEO comes on, I'm like, okay, boss, you're fucking everywhere. What are you going to tell me you haven't said everywhere in the last 48 hours? So we try to thread the needle between someone that people are interested in hearing from and someone who's not just whoring themselves out everywhere, which is hard because people don't want to come on their podcast unless they're in whore stage, if you will.

5:13A lot of effort goes into gas. Now, people think that I am someone who works around the clock and produces just a ton of content on my own. The key to all of this and the key in business is a very simple statement. Greatness is in the agency of others. Prof. G is, I think, 14 or 16 full-time people and probably six or eight contractors, video producers or video editors, podcast producers, data analysts. Catherine Dillon runs the business, editors, fact checkers, finance people. I have a tech guy who follows me around the world and makes sure that everything sounds good and is well lit. So we have a ton of people, much less the co-hosts.

6:00So these people give our stuff scale and make it professional. So we also have to coordinate with the other pods. I'm always traveling. We try to record the same time each week and punch out a bunch of stuff. So usually I'll sit down and five hours later for Prof. G and office hours, I have a bunch of stuff that will trickle out during the week and then we throw it over the wall to our video team that slices and dices it and then they throw it over the wall to our social media team that then just snakes it through all the different channels. I work a lot less hard than people think. I'm very good at not working.

6:34I worked pretty much around the clock for, I don't know, 25 years of my life, call it 25 to 50 and I decided to kind of get off that hamster wheel and now have a team of people that does all this. So what you're listening to now, I started recording about two minutes after I sat down and two minutes after it's over, I will leave. Not because I have work after for two minutes, but I like to make everyone laugh. And I don't know, I try to tell a bunch of bad jokes for a couple of minutes after the show ends. And then everyone else starts to work. We're even talking about having a producer here on London such that when the production teams end at midnight in the US, we go, you know, it's 5 a.m.

7:14here, someone wakes up here and can begin working. and with PropG markets, we're going to daily. So we're really gonna have a lot of content, if you will. I'm thinking about launching two more podcasts. I'd like to do a PropG China podcast. I'd like to do a PropG economics podcast because we're good at this. We have an infrastructure. I find it interesting. And while I thought I was just gonna have sort of some fun with this, it's turning into a real business. The total portfolio does, and I'm open about money. I think it's important people know how to make money and understand it. If you want to be wealthy, you got to become financially literate and start talking about money.

7:50Anyway, the whole portfolio will probably do about, I don't know, 17 or$20 million this year. It's a very profitable business. It's very much a winner-take-all business. It takes years to build these things. And just 10 podcasts are responsible or capture a third of all listenership. And I bet the top 100 capture two thirds. So the 1.6 million podcasts, 600 ,000 put out content every week. so 5 ,999 ,900 are fighting over one-third of the listener base. That's how difficult it is. I think it's probably easier to become an NBA player than it is to have a successful podcast at this point. But if you're blessed with having a successful podcast, it's a very lucrative business because the means of production here, I did an analysis for every one person we have, we get about 50 ,000 downloads or listeners.

8:36And I did the same analysis across it's Comcast and Disney, and they're getting about 10 or 15 ,000 views or listens for every one person or employee they have. So the means of production are more efficient here. And so while these are small business, $20 million isn't a big business, it's very, very profitable. It's growing 20 to 30 % a year. And I think that, and now my Greek lands are going again. I'm starting to think about launching new podcasts, packaging it all. And we're a disciplined company. We try to make great content. We try to be fearless. We try to be entertaining. One of our cultural standards is we overcompensate people.

9:16People never think they're overcompensated, but they are, at least here at Prof. G. We are, to a certain extent, monetizing my brand and background. We get exceptional advertiser rates. If you just run ads in an ad network or on AdSense, you're getting$2 or$3 CPMs. We get between$30 and$50 CPMs because see above. We get this incredibly attractive audience. and we make really good money and I don't want to go through the hassle of hiring and firing and upskilling. So we hire good people I've worked with for a long time or that come highly recommended. We pay them 30 to 50 % above market and they don't leave.

9:50And I find that's just an easier, more enjoyable way to run a business and your life, so to speak. So I don't do it to be a good, I try to do it to be grateful and put money back into the economy. But it's also, I think, a business strategy that works if you're blessed with a company that's really profitable. and it's all a bit of a flywheel. The podcast creates speaking opportunities. I make about 4 million bucks a year speaking. I charge an average of about 125, 150 ,000 a speaking gig. I do about 30 a year, 25 a year. The books, I make about a million, a million two on each book. Is that right?

10:23Maybe a million and a half, including international. And obviously the podcast, the podcast and the speaking support the books. And then the newsletter that goes out every week, we don't monetize it. We've just started monetizing. We're making about eight or 10 ,000 a newsletter. We're getting an advertiser sponsor. That goes out to about 300 ,000, 350 ,000 people. It used to be half a million, and then we cleaned out the people who hadn't opened in a month, a lot of bots. And it all is sort of a flywheel, right? The downloads inspire more book sales. The book sales inspire more speaking gigs.

10:56The speaking gigs inspire more newsletter. Newsletter more downloads. And the wheel flies, right? So we're trying to create a kind of a content flywheel that supports it. But, yeah, it's a nice business. It's a media business. And once you hit a certain scale, it's very profitable. But no, again, let me just finish where I started. Greatness is in the agency of others. What you're seeing or what you're hearing is about an hour and a half of my time. And I would bet every episode is somewhere between 20 and 40 hours of someone else's time. Even the person who runs this company, Catherine, tends to list almost everything.

11:32There's video editors involved, sound engineers, the producer who lined up the guest, who got the questions from Reddit. As you can imagine, it's a decent lift. But like anything, the only really rewarding things, the only way you make a lot of money, the only way you have really interesting life is pretty much directly correlated to just how fucking hard something is. And this is that. Thanks for the question. Question number two. Our second question comes from PrettyAfternoon7898 on Reddit, and they say, Dear Scott, you mentioned the word baller a lot. I just said it. When describing someone who makes a good income, what is your exact definition of baller?

12:12What income level do you need to have to be a baller in your view? Oh, I don't know. That's sort of an amorphous term. Let me start with what does it mean to be rich? Being rich is having passive income greater than your burn. such that your days are yours, that you can, so I am rich. Why am I rich? Because the interest, the income I get from some of the real estate investments I get, passive income, and the income I get from my investment base, which is also passive income, is now greater than my burn. Once you have that, you're rich. Because what that means is you have an absence of fear that if you lose your job or the economy shifts, you're still okay.

12:52And everything you do on the weekend and more importantly during the week, is your decision. Now, the first time that happened to me was very late in my career. I used to have to get up to work. I used to have to figure out, you know, do shit I didn't want to do. And now there's three buckets in life. There's things you have to do, right? Your biggest investors in town. It's your, I don't know, it's your anniversary and you have to go to dinner. Not that that isn't great. Not that that isn't something I really look forward to, but there's things you have to do. Then there's things you want to do.

13:25What did I want to do? I wanted to go to Chez Margot last Wednesday night and meet up with my friends and get shitty drunk. I wanted to do that. And then there's things you ought to do. Oh, the friends in town who you went to college with and be interested in having dinner. Oh, you know, a friend is having her 50th birthday party. You don't really know her that well, but she invited you because, you know, she like. And I'm like, OK, the key, one of the wonderful things about being economically secure is you can eliminate the should bucket. There are a lot of networking events and interesting things.

13:56I was invited to go on MSNBC yesterday. I've been making a lot of comments about the political situation. You know, I should do that. It'd be good for my brand. Okay, I don't want to. I have no interest in going on for eight minutes and speaking to some anchor on MSNBC about the same fucking thing over and over that they've been talking about all day. So I've gotten rid of the should bucket. So your ability to excise the word should means you're rich. But generally speaking, your passive income is greater than your burn. That is the definition of rich. My father, who between Social Security and his pension in the Royal Navy makes, I think,$52 ,000 a year, he spends$48 ,000.

14:37One, because his son is paying for his health care. But even before then, he was still in savings mode. My dad is ruthlessly cheap, and he was still saving money at the age of 94. That's rich. I have another friend who ran a very large division of a bulge-racking investment bank, made between$3 and$10 million a year. And between his ex-wife, his alimony, his home in the Hamptons, his Netflix or his NetJet card, I think he spent most, if not all of it. And there was no way he could stop working. His passive income was not greater than his burn. He is not rich. So this is a way of saying how to become a baller.

15:18you figure out a way, a financial path, you have the discipline, you have the skill to make money, you have the discipline to save money, and then chart a path towards a point where your burn will be less than your passive income. That's what it means to be wealthy or rich. And in my view, that probably means you're a baller. Thanks for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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17:25Welcome back. Our final question also comes from Reddit. Marian asks, How much of the hiring discussion looking for cultural fit and the ideal candidate is really people trying to find fancy concepts for intelligence, conscientious, and motivation? Okay, so essentially what you're asking is what is the value of the interview process? I think that interviewing is mostly worthless. Well, okay. There's a culture test, and that is we like to have everybody provide some input. I mean, almost everyone has black ball power. They don't have the power to hire people, but almost everyone has black ball power.

18:04What do we mean by that? Because in a world of remote work, I think it's really important that people get along. People want to spend time with each other. They're motivated to make their own plans to get together. And we're mostly remote. We have, what's interesting is everybody says young people don't want to work in an office. Our young people organically got a workspace in Brooklyn, and most of them show up pretty much every day. And maybe it's because, I don't know, it's a sample selection bias. And that is the people we have are kind of overeducated, ambitious, very economically motivated young people.

18:35But I think it's important that everybody, I don't want to say like each other, but enjoy or can tolerate each other's company because I think it's important in a remote world that people do want to get together on a regular basis in person. And I think it's really nice when they get along. I send my kids, I send my kids, my employees on trips all the time. And I think it's fun for them. I think they look forward to it. I think they brag about it to their friends. And I think it's a huge kind of form of soft compensation. And so it's important that they at least minimally get along or have enough respect for each other where they could go to Tulum for three or four days and get along and not dread go and get dinner with that person.

19:11So almost everyone has veto authority, but generally speaking, my total hiring strategy is reference hiring. And that is I got an email today from someone who said, I have someone coming out of MIT this year and he's just fantastic. And I'll look at his background. I'll ask the team, you know, what do we think? And then have people meet him. But we basically make the decisions on reference hiring. And the nice thing about having a small company is you can do a decent amount of research on any individual. I get fooled all the time in interviewing. I've had the most, I think the best interview I had was a woman who came out of, I forget where she came out of, AIG or something like that.

19:46She came to one meeting with me and then went on disability leave. She claimed she had an ear problem, which is fine, but would show up for all the social events. So clearly her vertigo or whatever she was suffering seemed to temporarily rescind when there was a social event, but couldn't come in for work and then sued the company after we got acquired. and basically got paid for two years after coming into the office for a day. She was clearly gaming the system. You know, pretty much an unethical person. And I thought she was just incredible when I interviewed her. And then other people I've interviewed and thought, God, that person was just brightened up the room by leaving it.

20:23But then somebody that's worked with them has said they're outstanding. In sum, you want to find anyone they give you as a reference, you don't call. You want to find people that they don't know your calling, who've worked with them, who will give you a no mercy, no malice appraisal of them. And if somebody I trust says to me, this person's outstanding, I don't care if I have a role or not. I don't care if we need people, I'll hire that person because in a company, and this is essentially every company right now where you're not blessed with an amazing brand or enormous capital, it's all about the people.

20:56So, and nobody can predict the greatness in people except for other people. So in sum, the interviewing process for us is really something we don't take that seriously. We do it as a sanity check to make sure this person isn't an asshole and people would like to work with them. But we're mostly entirely reference hiring at this point. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehours at prof2media.com. Again, that's officehours at prof2media.com. Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit.

21:31and we just might feature it in an upcoming episode.

21:37This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thanks for listening to the Prof G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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