Prof G Markets: Ask Us Anything — Scott and Ed Answer Your Questions

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1:12True story, I remember when I shot my first turkey. Boy, were the people at the Costco frozen food section surprised.

1:29little tame dad humor little costco membership retail dad humor there welcome to prop g markets what is going on today ed i usually introduce you as media analysts have we given that shit up media analyst, whatever that was. Okay. I need to put this to rest once and for all. Our company is called Prof G Media. So we called me the analyst of Prof G Media. And you keep on thinking that I'm calling myself a media analyst. I'm the analyst of Prof G. Thanks for straightening that up. By the way, that category, that puts me into a new employment category with much lower salary and no benefits. No more dental for you.

2:06No more dental for you. All right. So we are doing something different today. We've got a fun one. Tell us what we're doing. Yeah, we're doing an Ask Me Anything episode. So we'll be going through our listener questions that we received on Instagram and on Reddit and on YouTube. Thank you to everyone who sent in questions. We'll try to get through as many as we can. Are you ready to go, Scott? Let's light this candle. Okay. How did Scott and Ed meet? I don't remember. I don't remember. You don't remember? I remember very well. I know it was a bathroom, but I primed to remember where. We're off to a good start.

2:39It was the bathroom of the RNC in Milwaukee. Oh my God, that's my favorite stat. Grinder crashing in Milwaukee during the RNC convention. I just fucking love that. Anyways, go ahead. How did we meet? It was about four years. I'll preface it with this. It was about four years ago. I was in college and I was feeling generally pretty lost about what I wanted to do with my life. all of my friends were becoming bankers all of them were becoming consultants and for whatever reason I didn't want to do it I was I was stewing over this for a while and I decided to create a list of all the people I most admire and whose careers I wanted to replicate and I decided I'm going to just create this list and see if I can go help any of these people and Scott was on that list so at the time I was a big fan of pivot I had been for a while one day uh i'm listening to pivot and carin scott say please welcome joanna coles who is a friend of mine because she is the mother of my best friend and roommate from the boarding school i went to in massachusetts so i heard that i didn't even listen to the interview uh and i immediately put my phone down and reached out to joanna and said can you please introduce me to scott galloway which she did i connected with scott over email and then he offered to get on a phone call with me.

4:03I think you were on a beach in Mexico at the time. Yeah. And he offered me an internship and the rest is history. In my mind, it was a total no brainer to reach out to you because I think this is the learning. I had already done all of the mental work ahead of time that I needed to know that if there's an opportunity to meet Scott Galloway, I have to take it. I think that's sort of my takeaway. It's like, I mean, 90 % of your career battle is figuring out that question. What do I want to do? That's the hardest part. Once you figured that out, it's sort of autopilot. I knew I wanted to work with you.

4:40So yeah, that's how we met on a phone call, I guess. Yeah, well, thanks for that. That was generous words. And it made me feel nice to hear you say that. I didn't know some of that stuff. You're obviously privileged in the sense that you came with huge credentials coming out of Princeton. And to be fair, you knew somebody. you're not a nepo hire, but you knew someone who I'm friends with. And some people, because of the, you know, the income of the household they grew up with, don't have access to friends who know people in positions to hire them. I remember growing up thinking, like, all my friends, when they were applying to college, like, oh, my dad's friend is on the board of advisors for the University of Wisconsin.

5:22And I'm like, my mom doesn't know anybody. Like, we have no contacts. But anyways, the lesson here is that, or the lesson for me and my approach to hiring. So Joanna Coles called me and said, I have someone you have to hire. And I take Joanna very seriously. She's super smart. She's built companies herself. She's one of the few people from the magazine industry. For those of you who don't know Joanna Coles, she was the chief content or creative officer for Hearst. Editor-in-chief of Cosmo, too. Yeah, editor-in-chief of Cosmo, which at one point was the kind of biggest magazine in the world. And she's just a very impressive woman.

5:57She's now, I think, the co-owner of the Daily Beast. She's taken that over, which is, in my opinion, going to be like pushing a rock up a hill. But best of luck to you, Joanna. But she called me and said, in no uncertain terms, I have someone you have to hire. And that's the way I hire. If somebody I trust who I think is really smart is willing to put, not their reputation, but put their full-throated endorsement behind someone, I'll hire them. Because here's the thing, interviews for me are not worthless, but they're almost worthless. The best interview I've ever had was with someone at L2. She came in and she just blew my socks off.

6:36I'm like, this person is so smart, so composed, has such presence and everyone else was like, okay, fine, let's hire her. Two days after she started, she went on disability and she refused to tell us what was wrong with her because that would be an invasion of her privacy, but she used to show up to the parties. And it took us like nine months to figure out a way to fire her. I just went on disability and wouldn't even tell us why she was on disability, but was well enough to show up for any social thing we had. That was the best interview I've ever had. I don't remember doing the phone call with you, but I don't need to remember because I was going to hire you because someone I trust and respect said, I have to hire you.

7:20She said, this kid is so impressive. She said, he's good friends with my son. We hang out with him. I don't know if this was true, vacationed with you. And he's just such an impressive young man. You have to hire him. So I knew I was hiring you when I got off the phone with Joanna. I can't tell if that reflects well on me or well on Joanna. Well, you've been a fucking disaster. So I call her and tell her, she owes me. I'm like, you owe me. Yeah, 100%. No, that's reference hires is, I think, the big learning here. Moving on to a question for you. Scott, could you address the rumors that you were, in fact, Joe Bruin, the UCLA mascot during your time at UCLA?

7:59So that is 100 % true. This guy named Brady Connell, who was the president of my fraternity, was the Bruin Bear and came up to me and said, you should be the Bruin Bear. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And he said, the mascot at the football games is this giant bear in a Disney costume. And so I said, oh, okay. And so I tried out and I became the Bruin Bear at UCLA in 1983. I was a freshman and I traveled with the football team. I tried out for the football team and ended up dancing around on the sidelines in a fucking costume. and it was an interesting experience. I traveled with the football team for a season and me and the other bear would get ridiculously fucking high and stay out past the curfew.

8:44Can you believe it? I remember we went to the Fiesta Bowl in Arizona and we were playing against Miami. And so me and Harry Hirschman, the other bear, we went out and as you do when you're 19 in Arizona, we got ridiculously fucked up at a Mexican restaurant, ended up back at our hotel with a couple of women. And we just like partied like four in the morning. And then the next morning I got a call from like the Dean of Spirit Squad or whatever she was doing. And she came to our room with another guy, I guess for, I don't know, gravitas and said, I'm putting you on a plane home. You have violated NCAA athletic rules.

9:21You were not in bed by 10. And I'm like, let me get this. I don't have to march around in 140 degree fucking costume, wildly hung over. and you're pretending that's a punishment? You said that. Yeah, she was 11. I was so hungover. I think I had to, I'm not exaggerating. I think I had to excuse myself from distressing down in this meeting to go throw up in the bathroom. I'm like, I'm not throwing a football. I don't need to be, no one sees me. I'm in a hot box. I'm in this costume. I'm in Arizona. I'm going to be in a fur-lined costume making dumb poses. It's literally going to be 140 degrees in there.

10:02And you're acting as if that's a punishment. And her only comeback was, you're going to have to play for your own flight home. And I'm like, well, okay. And so it ended up that was all like, all bullshit. And they're like, fuck you, get in the costume and get to the Fiesta Bowl. But yeah, I did that. I was Joe Bruin for a season of The Mighty Bruins when we went to the Fiesta Bowl. Not something I talk a lot about. Although I used to try and get girls up to my room in the fraternity to see the costume. I'd be like, I'm the Bruin Bearer. You want to see the costume? Didn't work? No. Didn't work a lot.

10:36Yeah, yeah. It's something to talk about. It is something to talk about. Yeah. So yes, true. I was the Bruin Bearer in 1983. Wow. I did not know that. I feel like I know every dumb factoid about you. I did not know that. So next one, Ed, what does your portfolio look like? So my portfolio is very simple. It's all ETFs. So S &P 500 and then some wider baskets too, Russell 1000 growth. Russell 1000 value, very simple, plain portfolio. I don't think about it. I basically don't touch it. The reason I don't think about it is because I'm at a point in my career where worrying about stocks is basically just a waste of time.

11:18The highest ROI investment I can make is just being really, really good at my job. So to me, that means spending my time developing writing skills, developing speaking skills, understanding markets, meeting people, reading obsessively. That's what I spend my time doing. So, you know, I don't really pay that much attention to the portfolio. I take, if you want some more detail, I take 5 % of my income and put it in my 401k. Luckily for me, Scott offers a 5 % contribution match. So in effect, that's 10 % of my income that's being invested to build an asset base. I plan to start cranking that number up over time.

12:00But, you know, I live in New York and I spend a fortune on rent and food and alcohol and experiences, all of these things that I want to spend money on. So for me, 5 % makes a right amount of sense right now. But I think the idea is that, you know, once I start making really, really highly really meaningful income, that's when I'll start being a little more strategic and a little bit more bold with my investments. Maybe I'll look at real estate, maybe venture, maybe private equity. Those are all things I'm thinking about. But at this stage, just a plain passive ETF portfolio, that's what makes the most sense for me.

12:35I mean, I'm just sitting here thinking, I mean this sincerely, you're so much smarter than I was at your age. You're investing in the right places. You're taking a disciplined approach. even if you're in there you know you're going to be remarkably successful but on the off chance you're not as long as you you know continue to figure out a way to get 10 percent of your earnings into these etfs when you're my age regardless of whether you're a baller or not what you've achieved or not achieved economically or you're going to be fine and i didn't i did not realize that when i was your age who are your inspirations in and out of the business world well Well, it sounds pat, but I get a lot of inspiration from work.

13:18I love surrounding myself with super intelligent, creative young people. I get a lot of inspiration from you guys. The same thing happened at L2. I've always been pretty good at surrounding myself with young, smart people that have a different lens on the world. I get a lot of inspiration from the people I work with. I don't have, I try to, I have a few people in my life that, or that I've tried to get to know a lot about and they provide me with inspiration. I admire Muhammad Ali's courage. I feel like I've heard you say that you also admire, like, I found this interesting how poetic he was. Is that right?

13:53Well, the key to success is storytelling. And this is a guy who decided he was going to say, I am so pretty. And he would do poetry at pre-boxing hearings, whatever you call them. And he was just unafraid, very principled, decided that his principles around not going to Vietnam were not an opinion. It was a principle and refused to go. And they stripped him of his medals. They basically impoverished him. obviously outstanding at what he did. I just thought this guy was courageous. I mean, it sounds dumb, but I think of people like Richard Simmons, who was outwardly gay before it was cool. And I remember this one moment I was at LaGuardia in the middle of winter, must've been 20 degrees out.

14:41And this guy in front of me at TSA takes off his trench coat and he's wearing a sweater, except it's not a sweater, it's back hair. And he has like a sparkly tank top, short, short dolphin shorts, K-Swiss, and athletic socks. And the whole airport stops and TSA stops and they go, Richard, they go, Richard. And he cleared, made space around him, asked me to step back, which I did. And he stepped back and threw his arms into the air and went, hello, LaGuardia. No way. And the entire terminal stopped for a moment and then erupted in applause. Wow. And I thought, this guy is just so fucking unafraid.

15:29It's like, have you ever been at a club or at a place and somebody gets on the table and starts dancing and they're dancing as if no one's watching them? I'm like, God, I want to live my life like that. I want to be Richard Simmons. The bridge for me to get to that fearlessness is an embrace of atheism. It just doesn't matter if you make a fool of yourself or people don't like you or you get shamed or you do something stupid or you take a risk and you have public failure. You know, it really doesn't matter. What matters is while you're here having an amazing life. And And the only way you're going to have a truly amazing life, a life that's better than the environment you were born into and what logically the world would reward you with, is that if you have a little bit of Richard Simmons and Muhammad Ali in you, and that is you are willing to risk public shaming.

16:23You are willing to live out loud and that you very early decide what is the difference between an opinion and a principle. I mean, I just love that Richard Simmons story. Yeah, I tend to have a similar view on the people who inspire me. I mean, I love people who really understand humanity and for whom you can see that understanding through their work. I love comedians. I mean, you know, my favorite person in high school was Louis C.K. It's a little, I mean, he had his issues. So it's hard to say that now. There's nothing wrong with that. Everyone deserves their heroes. and I think it's important that you masturbate in front of your coworkers.

17:04I mean, that's a great role model. Sorry, sorry. Okay, if I whip this out and just have a little bit of fun. Just FYI, that is not a part of the employee handbook here, Ed, just so you know. I'm sorry, go ahead. Your role models. The question was inspiration. I wouldn't call him a role model, I'd call him inspiration. Oh, he's backtracking.

17:30Stay with us.

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19:48We're back with Prof G Markets. Top non-economic books everyone should read. Hmm. Do you have one? I have a bunch, but none of them are that profound. So like the books that really moved me, I remember distinctly as a kid, my father has mild epilepsy, which he failed to inform me or my mom. And I started having fainting spells and it was really traumatic at the time. I'd be in school and I'd see something unusual or a weird film or something and I would not feel well and I'd get up and I'd pass out. And it was kind of, you know, at the time it was traumatic. You know, the Galloway kid keeps passing out.

20:24And I read this book called The Great Brain. And it was a series of books about a kid living in, I think, I don't know, 1800s America. And there's a scene where these kids are in a lake and there's a rush of water or in a river and one of them drowns. And the kid, the protagonist, he says something happened to me that's never happened to me. And he says, I fainted and I passed out. And I remember thinking it gave me such comfort to read that that happened to other kids. And To Kill a Mockingbird, I remember thinking I'd like to be like that guy, that Atticus Finch character. I remember thinking I would like to be quiet and strong and not necessarily be a protector, not feel as if I have to always get in people's faces, just be quietly strong.

21:11Books that had a huge impact on me in high school were one, The Diary of Anne Frank and The Winds of War. I started reading about World War II and just the amount of sacrifice that people had made that kind of made America what it is today and the freedoms we enjoy and what happened to Jews in Europe in World War II. That had a huge impact on me. And then the other author that had a huge impact on me was Jonathan Irving. And he used to just write these books about that felt so real, but these people were just so fucking strange. and, you know, they put people in the weirdest situation about, you know, someone who gets hit in the face with a baseball and it changes their life or the story of a home for unwed mothers and it provided abortions and this love story that takes place in this context about a wrestling coach whose mother is a sad, I mean.

22:08That was my favorite growing up, weirdly, well, according to God. But I felt like everyone thinks they're a little bit weird. I think deep down we all think we're hiding some freak and that we're – maybe not all of us. I feel like I'm a weird kid. And that gave me comfort that the whole world is weird, that you don't need to feel strange or shamed because you're unusual or think weird things. The whole world is fucking weird and everyone's pretending not to be. But those books really moved me. Like they really made me feel something. I haven't read a non, the reality is in the last five years, I've written almost as many books as I've read.

22:46I read a lot. I read so much during the day that I don't get relaxation from reading at night. What about you, Ed? What's changed or what's been seminal for you? I mean, the question, what should everyone read? I personally think everyone should read The Odyssey. I just think if you want to understand storytelling at a very fundamental level, that is the book that you have to start with. It's basically, aside from the religious texts, the most influential book in history. It invented this idea of the hero's journey, which is the template for pretty much every story in our society today. The character in it, Odysseus, is super interesting to me and probably my favorite character.

23:30The context here, every hero in these stories, in Homer, has what's known as an epithet, which is basically like the adjective that's attached to your name. It's like being called the Incredible Hulk or whatever. So you have like swift-footed Achilles and earth-shaking Poseidon, all these characters. The epithet for Odysseus, the one adjective that is used to describe him was this word polutropos. It's a very weird word. It means of many different ways, which basically is saying he was anything moment to moment. He would change his nature. Another way you could say is like a man of twists and turns.

24:11And it's just such a unique, that was his superpower, basically. His superpower was the ability to read situations, read people's emotions, and adjust his behavior to get along with people, to make things work depending on the context. And I just think it says a lot about humanity that, you know, of all of these heroes with these different superpowers, you know, strength and speed and lightning bolts, the one that we exalted most was this word palutropos, this guy who would change his behaviors from context to context to make things work. I like this next one. Ed, do you plan on becoming like Scott when you're his age?

24:56In other words, Are you planning to really lean into the erectile dysfunction?

25:02Okay. Do you plan on becoming like me when you're my age? Fair enough. Let's move on. Well, no, actually, here's what I will say about this. Because I do kind of get that question a lot. Like, oh, where is this going for you? Like, what's the trajectory? And the answer to that is I don't know. and I'm fine with that because I'm making good money and I'm getting better at it and I'm enjoying it. And I think that if you're ticking those three boxes, you're headed in the right direction. So you just got to sort of enjoy it, see where it takes you. What I can say is that there are fundamental aspects of your life and your career that I do want.

25:47I think that's probably the way to think about it. The plan. So that's one of them. You make a lot of money, and I think I have to be real with myself and recognize that money is very important to me. I want to make a lot of money. I like nice things. I like the freedom it gives you. That's something for sure that I want. I also think that I like that you make money doing something that you're actually good at. like it's not like you bought a bunch of crypto and it went to a million and like you just ended up rich like you you get to say that you genuinely earned that money because of your talents and your hard work and you know like i said i i love money but i think i love it even more when i'm 100 certain that i deserve it and it's mine i think that's a big part of it third thing i'll say and this is the most important one in my opinion and kind of related to the thing you're saying about richard simmons i think that you in your career have figured out a way to express yourself fully i think and to me this is like the number one thing you need to do in life and i think it's actually really surprisingly difficult to do because when i look at i mean i haven't been around that long but when i look at my life the times i've been least happy were the moments where, for whatever reason, I felt kind of unable to express myself fully.