The Future of Prof G Media, How We Make the Podcast, and Why Scott Became a Professor

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1:57This is the first in a three-part series featuring some of our favorite office hours questions. Today's theme, my favorite topic, me. This episode is all about questions I've received about my life, my values, and the company we're building, Prop G Media. Let's bust right into it.

2:15Hey Scott, this is Barber from Istanbul. Long time listener and reader. I have a question for you that you might not like answering, but I think you would appreciate it. So the other day I was reading the corporate life cycle from Aspartum Modern, which I got to know for your podcast. Thank you for that. And he was talking about how long-lasting businesses usually have a succession plan in place. They usually think about succession just in case and they end up, you know, lasting longer. But then, I can't help but notice that the podcasts that you release, like Prof. G. Marcus, Prof. G. Podcasts, yes, they're based on your personal branding, but what happens if you decide to start one day?

3:01Or if you decide to pass it over to Ed and the team? Does that mean you will have to rebrand, or do you have a succession plan that you wish to share? Barbaros from Istanbul. That's a good question. It would be relevant, but I'm going to live forever. Yes, that's right. The midlife crisis at a rested adolescence tour continues. New dates announced. Okay, enough of that. Yeah. This business is getting to the point where I need to be thoughtful about creating enterprise value. When it's just a group of a small number of individuals, you don't have a business or an enterprise, you have a practice and people are too dependent upon one individual.

3:39I think about this a lot. But realistically, I'd like to think I have 20 good years in me. I know I have 10 good years left in me. But OK, still, a lot of people are making good money here. You want them to continue to make good money. And any business that's just dependent upon one business, you need to be thinking the way you're thinking about succession strategies. So what have I done? One, you noticed I've brought in Ed Elson. And Ed is the co-host of Markets. At some point, soon, sooner, actually, I'd like it to be sooner, I wanted to start co-hosting with guest hosts that aren't me, such that over time, Prof G Markets is the brand, not Scott Galloway.

4:18I'm focused on getting us to$20 or$30 million in revenue with$15 million in EBITDA. I think I can do that in the next three to four years and then build a series of voices that I help foster, create good businesses, and slowly but surely reduce the dependence on my voice. I always start a job thinking, all right, I either need to have an exit for people or build something where they could have 10, 20, 30 years of real solid earnings and help build economic security. And this isn't an obvious company that you sell, although to a certain extent, every four years you sell the cash flows and you can actually make tens of millions of dollars now if you're in a – we have three top 100 podcasts right now, which is exceptional.

4:57We're very good at what we do and we've also been very fortunate. it. So you can kind of every four years, we're in the midst of this now, renegotiate a deal. And the way I try and build economic security is I give, and also just selfishly to keep everyone engaged and acting like an owner, is I give everyone, or not everyone, but the majority of the full-time employees a percentage of our revenues. And so the question is, how do you maintain those revenue flows after I start going Biden, if you will? And by the way, I do not run the business. My partner, Catherine Dillon, has been running the business for the last few years.

5:31I have talented producers. So the risk is that I'm kind of the front end of the talent end, and we're going to need to dilute and diversify away from that over the next three, five, ten years, and we have a plan for that. But it's a correct question. Thank you for asking. A board strategy, a good fiduciary, focuses on succession strategy, and that is German companies demand that the CEO take at least four weeks off every year, and if the company goes to shit when they're gone, they fire the CEO because they need an enterprise. They don't need a practice. Thanks for the question. 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.

6:10How is the team structured for PropG 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. We 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 ad giant's the Prof G of the following.

6:51Prof 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 hosted 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. And 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.

7:37So 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. We'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.

8:13So I really, I love when we find an interesting young person who, so Kyla Scanlon, the economist on TikTok. 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. And 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 than when people come on, some famous CEO comes on, and I'm like, okay, boss, you're fucking everywhere.

8:54What 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. A 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.

9:39Catherine 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. So 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.

10:22And 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. I 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.

10:56And I don't know, I try to tell a bunch of bad jokes for a couple 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 U.S., we go, you know, it's 5 a.m. here, someone wakes up here and can begin working. And with Prop G Markets, we're going to daily, so we're really going to have a lot of content, if you will. I'm thinking about launching two more podcasts. I'd like to do a Prop G China podcast. I'd like to do a Prop G Economics podcast. because we're good at this.

11:30We have an infrastructure. I find it interesting. And while I thought I was just going to 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. Anyway, 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 win or take all business. It takes years to build these things. And just 10 podcasts are responsible or capture a third of all listenership.

12:01And I bet the top hundred 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. And I did the same analysis across Comcast and Disney, and they're getting about 10 or 15 ,000 views or listens for every one person or employee they have.

12:43So 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 percent a year and uh i think that and now my greek lands are going again i'm starting to think about launching new podcasts packaging it all um and we're very we're a disciplined company you know 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 people 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.

13:20We get exceptional advertiser rates. If you just run ads on, you know, in an ad network or on AdSense, you're getting two or three dollar CPMs. We get between 30 and 50 dollar 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 percent above submarket and they don't leave. And I find that's just an easier, more enjoyable way to run a business and your life, so to speak.

13:52So I don't do it to be a good, I do it. 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 million two on each book is that right maybe a million and a half including international and obviously the podcast uh 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 ten thousand a newsletter doing a getting an advertiser sponsor that goes out to about 300 350 000 people used to be half a million and then we cleaned out the people who weren't 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 the speaking gigs you know inspire more newsletter newsletter more downloads and the wheel flies right so 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 finished where I started.

15:11Greatness 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 listen to almost everything. There's video editors involved, sound engineers, the producer who lined up the guests, 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.

15:48And this is that. Thanks for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break.

16:12We'll be right back. excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC.

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17:39Hey, Scott. This is Sean calling from the Sunshine State of Florida. I'm a huge fan of you and all of your shows. While I've heard you speak about many, many things, and this show is called Office Hours, I've somehow missed you discuss your life working in academia. I began adjunct teaching on the side while working in the clinical world of healthcare. I realized I absolutely love teaching. And more importantly, I loved helping students discover their potential career path in healthcare, despite the fact that I still have much to learn in my mid-30s. This year, I accepted a full-time position as a teaching professor at a university in Florida, which has been an amazing experience thus far.

18:12My question for you is, what originally got you motivated to teach? And did your feelings change about teaching as the years went on? Like you, I'm not coming from a PhD background, but rather from working in the clinical world. I fear there will eventually be some sort of ceiling effect for me, both financially and just the idea of teaching the same thing year after year. I'm grateful for what I'm doing, and I'm enjoying what I'm doing, but I also like looking at the crystal ball, and I'm just eager to continuously grow as both a person and a professional, which is why I love all your shows. Thanks for your answer, and thanks for all that you do.

18:43Wow, Sean from Florida. We're going to need a bigger boat. So let's bring this back to me. My whole life, if I've wanted to be a teacher, I thought I would really enjoy it and I'd be good at it. And I contemplated when I was in business school applying to the Ph.D. program and getting my Ph.D. and pursuing a career in academia. And a couple of things happened. One, my mom got very sick and I knew that I would need to start making money, that I just didn't have the kind of the capacity to take on another three years of student debt or not be making money in a Ph.D. program. And also some of it is less noble.

19:13I just thought I'd really like to get out there and start making real bank. And I didn't see how I was going to do that as a prof, at least initially. So I went out. I gave myself 10 years before I would go back to teaching. And exactly 10 years later, in 2002, after graduating from Haas in 1992, I joined the faculty at NYU. And one of the motivations for joining was I thought I was going to be rich and that I could leave and just go focus on teaching. And I took a job paying$12 ,000 a year as an adjunct professor at NYU. you. And as you have your plans, then God laughs. My company read Envelope to go public, and on paper, I was worth a lot of money.

19:49And then I wasn't when the dot bomb implosion happened. So I kind of woke up and realized I was an adjunct professor making$12 ,000 a year. Now, having said that, I think academia is a wonderful career. It's definitely a caste system. It's definitely some of the most discriminatory business in the world. Essentially, the people in charge hire their PhD buddies. They write bullshit research, which is 98 % of peer-reviewed academic research is just bullshit to give each other citations such that they can qualify. They can get tenure, which is guaranteed lifetime employment, which translates to student debt as two-thirds of these individuals within 20 years are totally unproductive and overpaid.

20:26And tenure is this kind of this grift where because Galileo said the world might be round and we thought we need to protect academics, we've decided that the guy who came up with Gap 1 accounting in 1985 deserves lifetime employment. It's just fucking stupid. The result is a crowding at the top of the pyramid, and young academics who are really outstanding have trouble moving up because these people will not leave. And most of this quote-unquote tenure is nothing but a guild and a tax on young people, which translates to student debt. The administrative state is out of control at universities.

20:59My department chair, or one of my department chairs in marketing was essentially a pretty weak academic who was a functioning, semi-functioning alcoholic. So I know, let's give her an administrative role. Look, you're going in as a practicing professor. Here are some tips. One, this is a business. And the way you increase your compensation is by putting butts in seats. You're probably not going to do great peer-reviewed research. I was thinking about doing peer-reviewed research and then I read it. I'm like, this is stupid. None of this shit has any relevance to anything. And so I started doing a lot of research, but I did it on the guise of a private company called L2.

21:33And I got way more press and kind of private sector impact than almost any of the peer review research, maybe with the exception of some of the peer review research that the finance department does, which bubbles up guys like David Yermak and Aswalt the Motor and his is in peer review research, but it's just so powerful. But anyways, what I found is that the key to a currency, and there's four or five of these people, essentially at NYU Stern, we have four or five ringers. And that is someone, a professor that everyone feels like they got to take. Glenn Okun or Sonia Marciano at NYU. They are clinicals.

22:06They don't have PhDs. They're practicing professors, but they're outstanding teachers. And because it's a business, they have to have a certain number of classes that everyone, if they take three or four of these, they feel like they got their money's worth. Those people have real currency and power. I became one of those people. I became one of the ringers. And so I could put 500 butts in seats every year, which at$7 ,000 per class, which is what we charge at NYU Stern, you're technically generating three and a half million dollars in income. They're paying you a lot less than that, but you have some currency.

22:36So the key for you, my friend, is just becoming outstanding at teaching and getting more butts in seats. Some of the, I would avoid the administrative state, you know, if it's a means of helping out, fine. But for the most part, I think it's mostly a waste of time. I find that most of the administration and kind of program stuff on campus is just people pushing paper to each other. And my career took off when I decided I was going to do nothing. I was never going to spend any time on campus unless I was teaching. To do a market check. And what you do is you quit every three to five years without quitting.

23:07Every three to five years, I would interview at another university. I'd get called by a Cornell or a Wardner or Columbia. I'd interview, I'd find out what the offer would be. And then I'd go to the dean or my department chair and say, I don't want to leave. I'd be transparent, but this is my current value in the marketplace. I knew I had some currency because fortunately for me, the marketing department was not very strong in terms of in-room teaching. And they would match it. And so, you know, you've got to recognize that the leadership of universities generally sees adjuncts and clinicals as sort of, I don't know, like Russian soldiers that they just kind of throw into the meat grinder.

23:44And that is, oh, it's your calling. You don't actually need health benefits or money. We save that for the tenured faculty. faculty. So you have to create your own currency through butts and seats, and then you have to leverage it by occasionally interviewing with another university. That's kind of the politics of how the sausage is made. Having said that, you generally are in an environment where people are not assholes. They fight over every little thing because there's so little at risk or there's so little to be gained. But generally speaking, the people are pretty nice. The best academics are some of the most inspiring people you ever run across.