Scott’s Fitness Routine, Trusting Your Assistant, and Will the Rich Flee over Higher Taxes?

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2:29might feature it in our next episode. First question.

2:36Our first question comes from relationroutine2926 on Reddit. They say, saw a picture of you entering a boxing ring or something like that. You looked ripped. What are you doing to work out, diet, supplements? I take fitness super seriously. It comes from a weird place. I grew up very, very skinny. When I got to college, I was 6 '1". I was still growing. And by my sophomore year, I was 6 '3", but I was 6 '1", like 140 pounds. And I had bad skin. So I was just very self-conscious about my appearance. I looked like Ichabod Crane with acne. And then I started working out. I started lifting weights.

3:12I was on crew and the trainer there put me on this massive weight gain program. And by the time I was a sophomore, I was 6 '2", 6 '3", 185 and like ripped, quite frankly. And I took a drug called lacutane and it cleared up my skin. So all of a sudden, I remember the exact same moment, this woman named Cecilia, who was a cheerleader and I was at a fraternity party and she looked at me and she wouldn't look away. And I got self-conscious and I looked at her and she smiled at me. And I said to my friend, I said, that woman's staring at me. And my friend goes, bro, she's into you. I had never had a woman just look at me and like express that type of interest.

3:50who was that attractive before in my life. And I got confidence. I started doing better at sports. Women were interested in me for the first time in my life. And by the way, I think there's an advantage to not being very good looking when you grow up, and that is you develop other skills. I developed a sense of humor, recognizing that was my only shot at getting a woman to date you. And by the way, humor is right up there with good looks, maybe even more so. This is my impression of a woman. I'm laughing, I'm laughing, I'm naked. If you can make a woman laugh, she will go out with you. Anyway, so I got bigger and ripped and got very into fitness and immediately these wonderful things happened to me.

4:26So I've always associated being strong and, you know, looking OK with your shirt off, quite frankly, with a lot of good things. And my whole life for my fitness secret is the following. I have worked out four to five times a week for the last 40 years. There's just no getting around it. Fitness. And I think it's the ultimate use serum. I also do a shit ton of other things. The other two legs of the stool are nutrition and sleep. I prioritize sleep. I don't have an alarm clock. I generally go to bed around 2 a.m. I generally wake up around 9, somewhere between 9 and 10. I prioritize my sleep. My nutrition is where I fall down because I'm on the road a lot and I'm not disciplined.

5:03I eat a lot of shitty food. But when I'm home, I eat really well, a lot of organic stuff. So I probably eat better than most people, but not as well as I should. And where I really fall down is in my consumption of alcohol and to a lesser extent THC. and I'm trying to replace alcohol with THC. But I spend a lot of time thinking about my health, also supplements. I am on vitamin D, fish oils, NAD treatments, both intravenous and capsules. I am on testosterone therapy and have been for a few years now. Makes me feel younger, younger in the gym, longer erections. My skin feels healthier. Just, I don't know, just feel younger.

5:40The way I would describe testosterone, and I'm not giving medical advice, I'm just saying this is what's happened for me, is it kind of de-ages you or takes you back about five years. My workouts have changed dramatically. I'm more about mobility and flexibility now than about just trying to be big. I've lost about probably five or seven pounds of muscle. But yeah, I prioritize fitness. I do a combination of, I used to do CrossFit. I find my joints can no longer handle that at the age of 60. So I do something called, I do have a tonal or the equivalent of a tonal and amp. I have a squat rack and I do, you know, kind of CrossFit-like circuits.

6:16I try to limit my workouts to no more than 30 minutes such that I don't hate them, but I try to do something at least four or five times a week. Sometimes I go six or seven because I know I'll be traveling, but exercise, huge component of it. I take supplements. I try to eat fairly well, trying to reduce the amount of alcohol intake. And when I'm eating something that I know tastes good and is healthy, I try and load up on it. And also I prioritize sleep. I make sure that I always get enough sleep because I couldn't in my 20s and 30s. And you can handle that in your 20s and 30s. I used to take overnights to Germany when Audi was our client and go straight to work.

6:52And, you know, I could on four or five hours a night for seven days just go hard because I was trying to build a company in economic security. But I think once you get into your 40s and 50s, you really want to dial it back and realize that your 45-year-old liver is not your 25-year-old liver. And you need to prioritize sleep, nutrition, and exercise. eyes. You want to work out? Well, grab your shoes right goddamn now and go. That is the key. And that is eliminating the delta between thinking about it and doing it. But yeah, it's been an enormous gift for me. Thanks for the question. Our second question comes from Kim.

7:24Kim asks.

7:28Hi, Scott. This is Kim calling from Chicago. I have a question about hiring a personal assistant for the first time. I have a day job, but have been running a small side business doing design work in my free time. It's getting a bit overwhelming, and I've decided to hire a part-time personal assistant for the first time. It would just be a contract laborer. How do I go about trusting the person who I bring into my life to help me with my email, financial finances, all of the above. How do you vet someone and ensure that you can trust them with your important information and trust them enough to actually be of great use to you and make your life easier so that you can do more great work?

8:15Thank you. So first off, Kim, you're thinking the right way. Greatness is in the agency of others. I know so many, the difference between me and other academics who have a footprint in the fact that I make sometimes 5 or 10x what they're making, if not 50x. I get so many calls from academics, and they want advice. And what they say to me during the course of their call, if I really read through the lines is, hey, Scott, I'm so much more talented than you, and my work is so much more interesting, and yet you are so much more successful. How do I close that gap? And it's pretty simple. Greatness is in the agency of others.

8:48I've always been able to attract and retain really talented people to scale the talent I have and build bigger businesses. That's the whole fucking shooting match, full stop. And management goes into a different set of principles. And it's not something that's easy and it's not obvious. People think, oh, I'm a good person. I'm smart. That makes me a good manager. No, it's its own competence that requires compensation, building a culture, demonstrating excellence, giving people the sense that if they are loyal to you, you will help them develop economic security such that they think, okay, I'm going to attach my cart to this guy's horse.

9:22So that's a whole list of what it takes to be good at building businesses and stakeholder value. A decent place to start is to start scaling yourself with a personal assistant. I ultimately decided at a very young age, I don't want to do anything someone else can do for me. I want to develop a series of finite attributes, qualities, competences that I can become great at. And then I'm going to outsource everything else. It's called comparative advantage. It's essentially how nations prosper. And this is the way an individual prospers. And that first place professionally is an assistant. So let me be clear.

10:01I am fantastic at scaling myself with good people. I have been an enormous failure with assistants. There's like all my bad karma. Is that true? A lot of my bad karma has come around me with my assistants. Let me give you a brief insight into some of my latest assistants. By the way, my assistant who is with me now is outstanding, Mary Jean. But before that, my assistant was so severely depressed that for a good two, two and a half years, she could not get out of bed two or three days a week. And so I would have meetings and I would get a call from my lunch meeting and they'd say, where are you?

10:35And it would be on my calendar and I couldn't get ahold of my assistant. And then two days later, I would find out that she hadn't gotten out of bed because she was so severely depressed. And I should have got another assistant, which I eventually did. But I kept her on the payroll for a good two years because, you know, they're by the grace of God go I. And assistants make good money. They don't make great money. and it was pretty easy to look at my life, look at hers and realize that it was kind of easy to have empathy for what she was going through. Anyways, before that, my assistant who was good, but not, she was difficult for outsiders.

11:11And I used to, I got some red flags I should have listened to, but, uh, it ends up that she was taking my credit card or here's a fun story. My CFO comes into the office and says, uh, what are these charges? I'm like, I have no idea. I've never seen these before. And she said, well, your assistant, who shall go nameless right now, has been going to pharmacies, it appears, around New York and ringing up bills for everything from toys to cosmetics and then signing for them at her apartment. And it ended up that she was addicted to opiates and would go to a doctor's, different doctor's offices around New York, get a prescription and then on her way out with my card, buy a bunch of shit that she'd have delivered to her apartment.

11:54And if it sounds kind of inconsequential, you know, have empathy for someone under the influence of drugs, it amounted to about$110 ,000 or$120 ,000. So this was, and as soon as she got, she felt the heat that, quote unquote, our CFO was closing in on her. She went into rehab and wouldn't talk to anybody and then called us and said that she was suing us for the violation of the American Disability Act. Anyways, we basically said we're going to turn it over to the Manhattan DA unless she dropped the case, at which point she did. Anyways, those are my assistants. How are yours? So I can't lecture you on this.

12:28I think probably the vetting is similar to vetting on any employee. I think interviews are almost worthless. I mean, occasionally, you know, the bottom 10 or 25 percent, you think, OK, this person's just not going to work here. And occasionally, even less, less frequently, the top 10 percent are just so outstanding. You want to give them a shot. I get fooled all the time in interviews. What you want is arm's length references. And that is people they didn't give you people you find through LinkedIn or through your network that know this person that have worked with them that will give you an honest appraisal, including like this person sucks or I wouldn't work with this person again.

13:03And any reference they give you is not going to say that. So trying to basically diligence the person and also dating before you get married with an assistant. There's now all these services that connect you with a talented person in El Salvador to be in a remote assistant. And with AI, you can now have my assistant is essentially remote now or is remote, but try them. But be clear that first few months, you're going to lose time. She's not only where he's not only not going to save you time, you're going to lose time because you've got to get them up to speed on your bank accounts, your credit cards.

13:35the way you work, copy them on everything, have them listen in on stuff, give them feedback, constructive feedback without pissing them off or making them afraid to make decisions without checking with you first. Most people can't scale because they think that someone's just going to show up and be able to read their mind or they're not going to take the time to train them. Also, you got to be fairly Darwinian. If in the first couple of months it's just not working, cut them loose. It's got to be someone that's a fit with you personally, professionally, but you are going to have to spend time upskilling this person.

14:09Greatness is in the agency of others. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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16:13Expose corruption wherever we find it. And give fresh perspective on everything. From wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com. Welcome back. Our final question comes from Reddit. M.T. David asks, You said high taxes are part of why you moved to Florida, and I assume the same goes for your decision to leave the U.K. When will Democrats realize that if you raise taxes too much, people and businesses will just leave? The NYC mayor outcome will be interesting. Sounds like expensive proposals. at what point will that force more like you to abandon high-tax cities?

16:53Cheers from Montana. Thanks for this, MT David. Is that Mountain David? So there's different instances of where it backfires on people and where it doesn't. I did move to the U.K. for taxes, and I'm not moving back. In the sense that U.S. taxes follow you around the world. So I pay, because I don't make very much, i.e. none, capital or no money in the U.K., I don't really pay any taxes in the U.K. and your U.S. taxes follow you everywhere. And basically whoever has the higher taxes, you pay the highest of the two, but there's treaties such that you don't double pay. But I didn't move to the U.K., nor am I leaving the U.K.

17:26for taxes. However, this non-DOM tax, where they're basically saying, regardless of the tax status you might have enjoyed as a non-DOM-asiled resident of the U.K., they've done away with that. And a lot of people are going to see their taxes skyrocket, especially estate taxes. And then they've decided to peace out to Milan or Dubai. And my guess is the Treasury is going to end up with less money than they would have before the non-DOM change because of the loss in consumption revenue and real estate and property taxes. So raising taxes can absolutely backfire and result in a lower tax haul or lower receipts.

17:59So it's hard, but the trick is trying to figure out where that fulcrum is, right? I think it's important that states compete in the fact that Florida and Texas and I think Tennessee don't have a state income tax. I like that because it forces other states to compete. And I think that's a good thing. And one of the reasons I developed economic security was I engaged in a lifestyle arbitrage where I went to Florida, about a 13 % swing in taxes, which is big. And I was disciplined enough to take that 13 % and put it into the market. Market went crazy and boom, things worked out really well. A lot of that was timing, but some of it was discipline and the conscious decision to move to Florida and do a lifestyle arbitrage, which included lower taxes.

18:38In, I think it was like five, seven years ago, the state treasurer for New Jersey read that, I think it was David Tepper of Appaloosa was moving to Florida, which was going to reduce the tax rolls by like 100, 150 million bucks. That's how much he was paying in New Jersey state taxes. Had to call an emergency meeting and say, folks, we have to balance the budget. We're going to have to do something here. And the question is whether Mom Domney's increase in taxes about people making over a million dollars. What's the limit? What's the breaking point when more people leave and you end up with lower tax receipts than you would have had you not raise taxes?

19:13Right now, the top with including state, federal, and city taxes, the top income earners in New York probably pay about 50 percent. He's talking about raising their taxes an additional 2 percent on people who make over a million dollars. So I believe that there are probably easier ways to go about enforcing the tax code. I think a lot about taxes. The tax gap is the probably the most, you know, I don't know, missed opportunity. And that is about, I think about six or seven hundred billion dollars a year that the top 1 % owes in America goes uncollected because they basically don't pay those taxes, refile over and over again.

19:51And the IRS, which has been defenestrated and neutered by the Republican administration, which basically doesn't believe rich people should pay their taxes. These very increasingly complex tax code results in tax filers among the wealthy that they don't have the skills of the personnel to enforce. So if you just enforce the tax code, what is already owed, you might be able to close the tax gap. I don't know if that's as true for New York State. What I found really interesting when I moved to Florida is there's a New York State comptroller's office in Palm Beach because they want to make sure that you're not lying, that you've actually moved to Florida.

20:20And I got audited every year for several years after I moved and had to show documentation that we, in fact, had moved. And what was interesting is these auditors in Palm Beach auditing people who moved to Florida, they were on commission, which I found really interesting. Anyways, Momdami's 2 % tax increase. At the end of the day, at a minimum, they should have done some sort of elasticity or sensitivity analysis showing that New York is still worth it and that New York's wealthy. This wouldn't be the straw that breaks the camel's back and create an exodus of those taxpayers. So I think this just comes down to values and sensitivity analysis.

20:56And one, making sure that it's still the most attractive place in the world for the wealthiest people in the world, which is what New York is, and really understanding or having a firm grasp on whether or not this would be that breaking point. And then trying to figure out if there's better ways to raise revenues or cut costs, if you will. I don't know enough about New York City municipal finances to opine on. All I know is it costs about 12 times as much to build a mile of subway in New York as anywhere else in the world, and like six times as much as it does in Paris, and the French aren't exactly known for their efficiency.

21:30But anyways, anyways, thank you for the question. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehoursofpropertymedia.com. Again, that's officehoursofpropertymedia.com. Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in an upcoming episode.

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