Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway How to Get Unstuck — with Adam Alter About this episode Adam Alter, a professor of marketing and psychology at NYU, and the author of several books including his latest, “Anatomy of a Breakthrough” joins Scott to discuss what to do about feeling stuck, choosing when to explore vs exploit your career options, and why he thinks Lionel Messi is the greatest soccer player of all time. Follow Professor Alter on Twitter, @adamleealter.
Scott opens by discussing why he does not think Apple’s Vision Pro product will be successful.
Algebra of Happiness: it’s never too late to right a wrong.
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Transcript 10,845 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:18 Scott Galloway? Episode 253. 253 is the area code covering Tacoma, Washington, and the surrounding areas. In 1953, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned at Westminster Abbey. There was a huge dilemma over who would take care of her corgis once the queen passed. When it was determined they were all under the age of 16, Prince Andrew volunteered.
1:40 Speaker 02 The corgis were at each other's throats at the same time as the royal family would.
1:45 Speaker 03 Go, go, go!
1:54 Scott Galloway? Welcome to the 253rd episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at NYU Stern, a colleague, a colleague, and actually I would call us friends, and the bestselling author of Irresistible and Drunk Tank Pink. Our interview with Adam today comes from a livestream we did together with Section, our higher education startup where we discussed his latest book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. Adam is sort of a, I don't know, he's not that young anymore, but he was always the kind of the superstar, young superstar on the faculty at NYU Stern. NYU actually has a really strong faculty. It's super easy to recruit because you call a world-class faculty member at Ashesay
2:35 Scott Galloway? or Carnegie Mellon and say, hey, how would you like to live in Soho for a couple of years? It's a good rap. So we get a lot of, we get a lot of academics. We also get them, I think, in sort of the eighth inning a lot. So we don't have a lot of young people and also tenure keeps people around longer. Well, pass when they should be put on an ice floe. Is that going to make me more popular among my colleagues? Anyway, but Adam is always brought up as like this young star. Whenever we're talking about, you know, young superstar faculty, we talk about Adam and he also has an appointment in the psychology department. Okay, okay. By the way, my joke about Prince Andrew, someone tried to set me up with Fergie like 15 or 20 years ago when I was in New York and I wasn't interested. I wasn't interested.
3:17 Scott Galloway? I'm not going to go into why, but I could have dated Prince Andrew's ex-wife. I don't know what that means. She was, she was writing children's novels or something.
3:31 Scott Galloway? Anyways, what's happening? Apple has officially announced its mixed reality headset and a slew of other updates regarding the Mac iOS health tracking and messaging. The event was really impressive, no doubt, between the combination of design, the ability to draw in several million people to the livestream and it's what has to be its biggest product announcement since the Apple Watch. There's a lot to unpack here. The Apple Vision Pro has been marketed as an augmented reality platform and something that will introduce consumers to spatial computing. Well, isn't that spatial? I tried to do Dana Carvey there. Church chat lady, I don't think it works very well.
4:11 Scott Galloway? So, look, this is, I'm a skeptic. And I think AI is amazing. I thought the metaverse was stupid. I thought Web 3 didn't make any sense. I thought voice was fantastic. I love making very big generalizations about technologies. I don't fully understand this thing. And I think it has an uphill battle. One, it was greenlit when the market thought there would be a bigger market for these 3D renderings of the web called the metaverse, or these fully immersive experiences. I believe that had they, if they could have that billion dollars back and not launch this thing, they would do it. When you're in marketing, a decent way to kind of start, or when you're evaluating
4:55 Scott Galloway? a concept or a project is, what's the business we're in? What is the product? And what is its point of differentiation? I'm not entirely sure how to answer that here. Or put another way, what problem does it solve? Maybe sort of three dimensional or more immersive entertainment experience. It might be a Zoom killer, maybe? It strikes me that it's probably more of an enterprise solution than a consumer solution. This is why I don't think it works. And if anyone can make it work, it's Apple. I don't think the Apple Watch, right out of the gates, made a lot of sense. It took two with a pain to charge every night. In my opinion, was not functional. It was just a, I would argue, it's not even a wearable. It's just a second screen for your phone. But Apple has such incredible staying power, such incredible marketing, such incredible
5:40 Scott Galloway? iterative skills, that slowly but surely, they just sort of overwhelmed the industry with innovation around the watch. And now, the Apple Watch sells more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry combined. And they could do the same thing here, but I am more skeptical. Why is that? One, I think at a very basic level, people don't want to put that thing on their head. Why is that? The things that can eat you, and the things you can eat, very rarely come at you directly. They attack you, or they're running or hiding from the side or behind you. If you're hunting a jaguar, or as I say here in London, a jaguar, it will actually circle back, come behind you, and attack you from behind, recognizing you're more vulnerable
6:24 Scott Galloway? because you don't have eyes in the background. Isn't that amazing that animals are born with that instinct of knowledge? Anyway. As a result, we are very sensitive to movement and motion in our peripheral vision and very sensitive to it being inhibited. One of the reasons that outdoor advertising, specifically billboards, are so powerful is that you notice things in your peripheral vision. Think about when you're walking down the sidewalk and you hear someone walking just out of your vision and your peripheral vision are just behind you and you hear their footsteps and it's just them and maybe you walking behind it, you feel vulnerable. If they were to attack you, you would be very susceptible. So I believe that putting things on your head that block out your peripheral vision
7:08 Scott Galloway? is just naturally uncomfortable. Also, we are a species that needs to see the horizon or we start feeling motion sickness. And with the Oculus, I don't know what the data is here, no one knows what the data is here, supposedly somewhere between 40 and 60% of people who spend more than 20 minutes on an Oculus start to feel nauseous. In sum, I don't think people want to put this shit on their head. I just think this thing is, these things are stillborn. If you think about the ultimate metaverse or spatial reality, the place to do it was the incredibly creative 150 billion dollar gaming industry and they haven't gone headset. I mean, they've tried and then they realized it doesn't make any sense. People don't want to play that way.
7:53 Scott Galloway? They don't want to relax that way. It's not that relaxing. Even when I'm watching a football game with my kids, I want to see their reaction and I'm just more comfortable having certain elements of my peripheral vision open and available to me and free to me, if you will. The other thing that really scares me about this, or where I think it's in sort of no man's land, is what is arguably the hardest thing about a business. The hardest thing about management is compensation. Trying to figure out what to pay people such that you keep the company alive, you don't overcompensate them. There's, there's no bigger pay cut than calling all of your employees into a room, and I've done this before, and said, sorry, but we're laying off a third of the company and those third are in this conference room right now.
8:37 Scott Galloway? That is a really ugly day for everybody and that comes from a lack of discipline or structural shifts. Anyways, the hardest thing from the consumer standpoint of your business is pricing. I just never know what to, how to price it. I never, I find it so difficult. I find that this price is literally no man's land.
8:58 Scott Galloway? And that is a $3,500 price point. Think about plus, you know, 8% tax or whatever the sales tax if you live in California, what is that? That is 240, $280. So you're talking 3,800, basically talking about 4,000 bucks here. If you're going to charge people $4,000, I think it needs to be a product that has, that's more enduring. So the useful life of a car is 10 to 15 years. The useful life of a jet is 40 years. Get that, get that. Daddy's in the market for a jet. Do you know jets last, their useful life is 40 plus years? Isn't that amazing? So if you buy a 10-year-old jet, you're kind of buying a two or a three-year-old car. It feels brand new. Anyways, that has absolutely nothing to do with our conversation.
9:40 Scott Galloway? If you buy a laptop, it degrades pretty fast, but I would say the useful life is probably two or three years. And a laptop is now, you can get a great laptop for 700 or 800 bucks. A TV's useful life, it seems like it's less, but it's probably more like five to seven years. And those things, you can get an amazing TV for a thousand bucks. So you're telling me, I'm going to spend 3,800 bucks on an item that has all of this camera and lens technology and, and power and chip technology that spells to me, it's going to need constant iteration and updating. There's no way. There's, I just don't think there's any way this thing
10:19 Scott Galloway? is nearly as util, nearly as relevant as the original vision, 12, 18, 24 months in. And there's that 3,800. I think this price is literally in no man's land. If they had charged 10 grand and said, that includes, I don't know if they could have done this, but constant upgrades, you only need to buy one. It's just always going to be the mixed reality headset you need. And you just bring it in and we'll refurbish it for 100 bucks or 200 bucks, whatever it might be. I just think the market here is just tiny. I just think it's absolutely such a niche market that won't move the needle for them. Could there be some spillover? Could there, could it be like the technology of the peace dividend?
11:00 Scott Galloway? Could there be a technology dividend that flows technology into their other products? Maybe, maybe auto companies, and let's go back to jet aviation, have a flagship product and that technology will leak down to their other models. The seven series was the first car to have dual climate temperature zones. And then it leaks down to the five series and the three series. It was the first one to have heated seats and then it leaks down, what have you? Maybe this will be kind of their technology test lab and the sensors or the AR will move down to the iPhone. I also don't want it to win. I'm, and I'm a huge Apple shareholder, or huge for me, not huge for them. But I'm increasingly worried that we are sequestering from one another.
11:45 Scott Galloway? And we're, we're developing all of these reasonable facsimiles of life. Brought to you by the industrial digital complex that make us less and less happy because the key to happiness is the depth and number of meaningful relationships. And relationships are a function of proximity and physical presence. And this yet again is another thing that's going to take us away from each other, that's going to sequester us. It's just, I just find it so fucking nihilistic and depressing that the most powerful companies in the world, the wealthiest companies in the world, the companies that have the most technology, the companies that have the deepest resources run by the smartest people either want to put us on Mars or take us into another universe or put some shit on our heads so
12:28 Scott Galloway? we can't really even see each other, but we can see some sort of 3D rendering of a Clippers game or porn. Well, fuck me, that's not what life is all about.
12:40 Scott Galloway? Jesus Christ, what, what problem does this solve? Answer me that. Well, how are you solving anything for me here? A lot of excitement. The best thing hands down about the mixed reality headset that was launched by Apple was seeing Tim Cook dance. There's a video showing him after the, after the keynote dancing. I like Tim Cook so much and that dance, he deserves to dance. He has added more shareholder value than any individual in history.
13:09 Scott Galloway? Jobs took them to 300 billion. He's taken them to 3 trillion. Some people will argue, justifiably, that 0 to 300 billion is harder than 300 billion to 3 trillion. But still, nobody has added $2.7 trillion in shareholder value to a single organization. And Tim Cook, my brother, get your boogie on, Big Cook. Big Cook is in the house. Show us where your mother lives.
13:35 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back for our conversation with Adam Alter.
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16:01 Scott Galloway? Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at NYU Stern and the author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. Adam, great to see you. Just a quick story about Adam. Like Adam's such a baller, he wouldn't come to department meetings. And essentially, the entire conversation would be around, how do we recruit more junior professors like Adam Alter? It was literally just like, I stopped going to department meetings because it was all like, how? It was, you felt like you were the middle child. And then basically, mom and dad would keep saying, why can't you be more like Adam Alter? Anyways, Professor Alter, it's always good to see you.
16:40 Speaker 04 It's very good to see you, Scott. If you say that, you're welcome to join me everywhere I go.
16:44 Scott Galloway? My God, it was literally obnoxious. I know, I know, Adam, blah, blah, blah. Anyways, Adam, let's, let's bust right to it. Your book, Breakthrough, or Anatomy of a Breakthrough. So before we talk about getting unstuck, if you will, how do you recognize when you're getting stuck? What are the elements of, of starting to identify, I'm, I'm hitting? An unproductive moment professionally or personally?
17:11 Speaker 04 I think it's obvious, and I think when you don't feel stuck, when you feel like even if things aren't changing, if you're comfortable with that, then you're not stuck. It's a very subjective experience. So when you speak to people, and I I've run this survey on thousands of people around the world now, asking them for their experiences of stuckness. And they'll tell you very clearly, I wish I could make progress financially in my work, in my personal relationships, whatever areas it might be. So very often, it's just subjective. But of course, there are domains where you have objective feedback, where you know there is some metric telling you that things are slowing down. Whether it's about money, whether it's about followers, whether it's about any form of engagement or some metric that matters to you.
17:51 Speaker 04 You might have an objective signal, but but chiefly it's about that feeling. I I was speaking to someone last night. He told me that his dad was a mathematician. And he spent thirty years working on a problem. He never felt stuck, even though it took him thirty years to come up with a solution. So if you're engaged and you're happy and you feel like you're where you want to be. Essentially, you're not stuck.
18:10 Scott Galloway? If you're i i if you're engaged, I like that. If you're engaged and happy, you're not stuck. That makes that makes a lot of sense to me. When you think, okay, I'm I am stuck and professionally, financially, personally. What are the kind of the first steps to getting unstuck?
18:27 Speaker 04 So a lot of people rush to act. Um. You know, there's there's a confusion in the brain between being physically trapped and being mentally stuck or emotionally stuck. And when you're physically trapped, we're very well designed to deal with that. You read these stories all the time in the paper of hysterical strength. These people who lift cars off others and off themselves, you know, they that's a very adaptive way to respond to physical entrapment. But unfortunately, that kind of flailing fight or flight adrenaline response is terrible when you're emotionally and mentally stuck. So you've got to slow things down. I spend a lot of time in the book talking about how to strategically slow things down. I talk about Lionel Messi, the soccer player. I talk about uh musicians, artists, people in all sorts of creative
19:09 Speaker 04 uh industries and about the importance of taking a beat before you do anything. So that's the the first critical thing. Once you've done that, once you've accepted where you are, you understand the lay of the land, you know what your options look like, you can start to strategize and then start taking action.
19:24 Scott Galloway? Yeah, I think you referred to it as a creative cliff. And then, by the way, everyone you mentioned is totally unimportant with unimportant with the exception of Lionel Messi. So can you tell the story about Lionel Messi and how that relates to being getting unstuck?
19:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, so I think he's the greatest soccer player of all time. I think he's certainly the best player alive today, and I think probably the greatest of all time. And one really fascinating thing about him that a lot of people don't know is that growing up and even still today, he was famously anxious before soccer matches. And when he was young, a lot of coaches said he's never going to make it big because he's too anxious. You know, he used to be physically sick before matches. He would complain about getting on the field. And once he was on the field, sometimes he struggled to perform at the beginning of the game. And so to cope with this anxiety, he developed this technique of not doing anything for the first three or four minutes of the match. So what he started doing was instead of playing the game actively from the first minute,
20:18 Speaker 04 he would amble around the center circle of the field and just watch everyone else play. So he was effectively, you know, there were 22 players on the pitch, but this one player was not yet playing the game. And what he was doing instead was two things. One, he was getting himself in the position where he could play the remaining 85, 90 minutes of the game. But he was also strategically looking at how everyone else was playing. He was learning where the weaknesses were in his opposition. Were two players who should have been connecting not connecting? Was there a weakness on his own side? Or was there someone who was particularly engaged? And that made him more effective later on. And we know he does this because if you look at the goals that he scored, he has scored in every minute of the game at least once, except minutes one and two.
21:01 Speaker 04 He's effectively not playing the game yet. And still, despite that, and because I think he slows down, he is the most effective soccer player in the world.
21:10 Scott Galloway? Yeah, so Ronaldo and Mbappe would like to have a word, as would Pelé. Now let's talk about going from defense to offense. How do you try and create a context? Or set yourself up for a breakthrough. And first off, define a breakthrough. And then how do you set yourself up to increase the likelihood of a true breakthrough?
21:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, so a breakthrough means different things in different contexts. And I think because this audience is interested in business and entrepreneurship, obviously, a breakthrough means something very specific in that context. It means moving beyond whatever plateau you've hit now, or whatever barriers you've hit now to the next thing. Those barriers are universal in business. So you hear about the end product after ten barriers have been faced and overcome for all the most successful products and companies. But if you, as I've done, you read, say, a hundred biographies of the hundred most successful entrepreneurs of all time, and you look at the origin stories, they involve just one massive hurdle after another that they managed to overcome. Now, there are also people you don't read about in biographies who didn't do that.
22:14 Speaker 04 But those breakthroughs are effectively the other side of that experience when you hit that barrier. And so the big question is, how do you achieve that? And a large part of it, so looking at careers and looking at what people do, the most effective single strategic thing you can do to make breakthroughs is to do these two things that are in opposition to each other, known as exploring and exploiting. So exploration is when you spend a bit of time roaming far and wide and trying to experience as many things as possible. I give a talk to the freshmen at NYU sometimes, and the talk is about saying yes. It's about saying yes to all the opportunities that come your way, and that's during a period of exploration. In fact, I show them four emails that I've got over the last fifteen years that have changed my life,
22:59 Speaker 04 where I had the option and my instinct was to say, I'm not going to do that. It's going to be time consuming. It might not work out. But it produced outcomes that changed my life. And you only know which emails they'll be by saying yes to a whole lot of them. So that's a period of exploration. You try different things. Jackson Pollock, the painter, before he became the drip painting expert, did a hundred different things. Peter Jackson, before he made Lord of the Rings, was making horror films. You've got to try stuff. But at some point, you've got to call it and say, "Look, I've been trying these ten different techniques and approaches. I can't explore forever." But what I've got to do next is exploit and exploiting is when you become absolutely single minded, focused just on the thing that you think is going to bring you the most benefit. And that's when you say no to everything else. So you move from this mode of saying by default, yes,
23:45 Speaker 04 to saying by default, no, I'm not going to do anything that's not in the service of this one thing that I'm going to devote my heart, mind and soul to.
23:53 Scott Galloway? Yeah, so as is I've, this has been difficult to go this long without turning all this back to me. Um, but I'll start. Uh, this guy named Barry Rosenstein, who's the founder of Jana, this multi-billion dollar hedge fund, said something that was profound for me, and that is, he said, there's three buckets in life. There's things you have to do. So he said, if my biggest investor's in town, I have to meet with him. He said, and there's things I want to do. Like we're, he said, I want to go to the Bruce Springsteen concert. And there's things you should do. Right? Your coworker's daughter is having a bot mid, so you really should go. There's a roundtable discussion around alternative investments. You really should go.
24:35 Scott Galloway? He says the true focus and true luxury in your life is eliminating the should bucket. And now I'd say constantly to my team and to the people in my life, like, oh, we really should do this. I'm like, I'm no longer about should. Do I want to do this or do I have to do this? And it strikes me that when you're really focused on an objective, you clear out all should. And it's what do you need to do to to just get to that, that one thing? Does that, am I interpreting this correctly? Do you want to edit that at all?
25:09 Speaker 04 A hundred percent. I think that's true. I think when you get to the exploitation phase, it's about not doing the shoulds. It's about figuring out exactly what you want to do. And what you want to do is in service of whatever that goal is that you're you're heading towards single mindedly. But it's a privilege to be in that position, right? The ability to say no to the shoulds comes over time with development, seniority, with all sorts of other things. It's a luxury and it's not something that's afforded everyone. But I think you can afford it yourself by giving yourself license to be in the no phase of life. I'm not exploring now, I'm exploiting. And so to do that, I am going to say no to a lot of the things that felt fall in the should bucket that I might have said yes to when I was exploring. And and this tracking careers, thousands of careers is one of the most interesting studies I've ever read.
25:53 Speaker 04 Looking at entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, creators, filmmakers.
25:58 Speaker 04 If you want to know when you're going to hit a hot streak in your career, this great golden period of growth, it is when you have explored and then exploited and doing it in exactly that order and knowing when to switch from one to the other is the key. And it's that moment when you stop saying yes to the shoulds, you start saying no.
26:15 Scott Galloway? So I think a lot about, you know, I love the character, um, Veris, is that his name? He's like the mentor in Game of Thrones or
26:24 Speaker 04 Yes.
26:25 Scott Galloway? He says, I served the realm and I loved, I saw this clip, I think, of course, on TikTok and he says that power is an illusion, like who really holds power in a situation and it's who the people think has power. It's nothing but a shadow on the wall. And I think about my own struggles when I've been stuck. And a lot of it is illusory or just a shadow on the wall. And that is, and for those who don't know, Adam has an appointment in the psychology department is, I think, as much as, uh, his domain expertise is as much around psychology as it is around consumer behavior. But when I've been stuck, it's been a function of I'm focused on the immutable. I'm focused on the past, which I can't change and I beat myself up.
27:07 Scott Galloway? I get angry at myself, I get upset at myself and it paralyzes me because I'm so disappointed in myself. I'm so angry about something that is literally immutable. And whether it's Stoicism or Buddhism, it says, pretty much, look, boss, you, you know, be upset and focused on the things you can control. As someone who has domain expertise in psychology, what is the link between beating yourself, self up, depression, anger, things out of your control and getting stuck? And then what are the, what are the practices around self-care and mental wellness to get unstuck?
27:47 Speaker 04 I mean, a full three chapters, a quarter of the book is about exactly that. It's about the emotional consequences of being stuck. It's about the unhelpful patterns that people have in ruminating over the past, of focusing on the wrong things, of focusing on the things they can't change rather than looking forward to the things they can. And the reason it's three chapters is because, you know, people always say, what am I going to do? How do I do this thing to get unstuck? But we neglect. Traditionally, that emotional part of what it is to be stuck, it's an incredible, it's universal, it makes people feel unbelievably lonely. I I've had all these interactions with people over the years, asking them about the experience of stuckness. They say a lot of things that sound like what you're describing, in looking back and ruminating. But they also
28:29 Speaker 04 say, this is such an extreme and and central part of my existence, that I would pay a vast proportion of my resources and do whatever it takes to get unstuck. I just need to be pointed in the right direction. So I think there is, there is this, um, this real struggle that comes for a lot of people with knowing how to cope emotionally at that first stage, with the experience of being stuck, so that they can then marshal their resources to actually do the things they need to do to get unstuck. So I agree, uh, the emotional part is, is a huge thing that you've got to work through before you can start actually doing things and strategizing.
29:01 Scott Galloway? Just being more tactical, but what about being stuck in a relationship? What about not being able to get past hurt or disappointment, or you feel like you're in an unproductive or a bad marriage? I was, again, all of my learning comes through HBO. I was watching Succession, and I'm literally have PTSD from Shiv and Tom's relationship.
29:20 Speaker 04 That was a horrific discussion on the balcony, wasn't it?
29:23 Scott Galloway? I mean, people just shouldn't, no relationship is much better than this. People should never be this mean to each other. I just don't, it literally like, I had to turn it off. I'm like, people should just not be that way to each other. Anyways, talk specifically about when you feel like you're stuck in a relationship or something that's unproductive in your personal life.
29:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, I mean, I, I think, you know, that there are often discussions that people have about whether to stay in a relationship that's as toxic as the relationships that are depicted on Succession. And it's a very, it's a very good question, especially if there's abuse or something's going on that makes it an untenable situation. Um, but with any of these discussions and decisions, there's always this, the two endpoints are to quit, to exit, to get out, whatever the thing is that's going on, and to do something different, whether it's being single or trying to find a new relationship, or to stick with it and to try to improve it. And that's going to be true whether you're in business. It doesn't matter what the domain is, but that's the Key decision and if you're going to quit, if you're going to leave, that's fine.
30:26 Speaker 04 That's a decision you've made based on the information you have. You still need to slow things down the way Messi did. You can't make that decision rashly. But if you're going to do that, that's fine. If you're not going to quit, then every resource has to be in essentially, and this is a terrible term in this context, but exploiting the relationship in the explore exploit sense. So you have to do everything you can to become kinder, to become a better parent, to become a better mentor, to become a better husband, wife, whatever it is. And that might mean therapy. It means very different things for different people, obviously. But you should, as you would with a business or with anything else, you've got to pour your whole self into that process of making that thing better. And I mean, we could talk about succession all day. I certainly could. Between succession and messy, we could take up a whole hour.
31:10 Speaker 04 But um yeah, I mean, I think that's there are better ways to do things. And I think humans are not sort of well wired for those kinds of interactions, the kinds of interactions that happen in relationships and marriage. We screw up a lot of those because we just don't know what we're supposed to be doing. You need therapy or you need to read something that'll give you a little bit of guidance. And so do that, be a be an omnivore, consume as much as you can.
31:35 Scott Galloway? The reading some, reading your work, Adam, a lot of it had echoes of Daniel Kahneman's thinking slow and fast.
31:41 Speaker 04 That's high praise. I'll take it.
31:43 Scott Galloway? Well, just the notion that it's hard to read the label from inside of the bottle. And on important decisions, you want to slow down your thinking. And I like that you, when you feel stuck, you you said going to this creative cliff, making rash decisions, feeling like an action orientation is going to solve this can have bad consequences, right?
32:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, and also speak to other people.
32:05 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
32:06 Speaker 04 The the most valuable resource we have as humans, no other animal has this. You know, the the unhappy anteater doesn't have like 12 other anteaters that it can go and commune with and talk about the problems of being an anteater. But as humans, we are uniquely in this incredible position of having tremendous social resources. So go talk to people who are like you, but even better, talk to people who are maybe not not exactly like you. Different expertise, different backgrounds, a different understanding of things. And that has tremendous unsticking properties. If you're unsure about something. That is your greatest resource is the fact that you know other people. You don't live as an island. And so just there's an incredible un-sticking effect when you're making these really big life decisions
32:47 Speaker 04 in particular that comes from just having a conversation with someone else about them.
32:53 Scott Galloway? I love you say in the book that originality is overrated. And I actually, I, I, I agree. I, I won't, I'll let you go and then I have some thoughts.
33:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, I'd like to hear what you have to say about it. I, it's just, this is in my experience, uh, working with a lot of entrepreneurs and creatives. I've worked with musicians and authors and I've, I'm an author myself. And I think what we all search for, and this is true in business in particular, is novelty. So whether you're an investor in businesses, whether you're a creator of businesses, whether you're just interested in being a creative yourself. We think that novelty and genuine radical originality is the only path to true success. And honestly, that's just, it's a myth. It's a lie. There is basically no such thing as radical originality. You know, I challenge anyone to come up with a truly radically original novel product that did not stand on the shoulders of either giants or maybe not giants, but certainly other ideas.
33:46 Speaker 04 And so many of the best businesses were not first. They didn't do something that no one else was doing. And it's true about creatives as well. It's true about, I talk about Bob Dylan and a whole lot of other examples of people who we think of as being sort of genuinely original. And I think the liberating thing about that is there are other ways to, to make successful products and ideas happen. The best one that I know of is to combine two things that are old in a new way, which is really much easier than coming up with something genuinely original. And so I talk a lot about this art of recombination of finding ideas. And for the last 20 years, I've had a, a couple of documents where I collect ideas as they come to me, as they happen to arise. And so now that document is just thousands of ideas deep.
34:29 Speaker 04 And if on a random day I say, let's look at idea number 27 and idea number 412. And the, the task that makes me kind of nimble at this is to say, how could you combine them in a way that hasn't been done before? And often there's a business, there's a book, there's a new idea. So I think recombination is a better way to go than radical originality.
34:48 Scott Galloway? Yeah, it's, I mean, I remember our colleague Peter Goldner, who was at NYU and is now at Dartmouth, is devoted his entire research effort to proving, and he's right, that the original player, whether it's a GUI or mobile phone or search, is never the one that captures all the stakeholder value. It's the person that comes in and improves on it. And when I get accused of doing something original, I'm like, no, I find other people's work. I put a different spin on it. I apply it to a different medium. I maybe say it in more provocative human terms. I don't think of myself as original at all. I think of someone who wants to find other people's work, and I reference them and I credit them. I don't plagiarize it, but I mean, this is amazing work.
35:32 Scott Galloway? And if you can bring to bear something that's fantastic, but incrementally improve upon it, you know, that's where the sauce is. Because the truly original breakthroughs to thinking is super important, but it generally doesn't create a lot of value because it's by virtue of being truly original or breakthrough. It's a little bit ahead of its time and hard to commercialize. So it's like, you don't need to be original. You need to have an incredible appreciation for something interesting and then say, what is my view on it? Or is there a different way to communicate it that reaches a broader audience? What about, so when we talk about being unstuck, and immediately there's a lot of notion around, and you talk about this,
36:16 Scott Galloway? and our colleague Jonathan Haidt talks all about this, is that when everyone's barking up the same tree, you get stupid. And you referenced that it's important to speak to people outside of your circle to get a different viewpoint. You talk about diversity and crowdsourcing for getting unstuck. Say more.
36:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, so essentially, there are three kinds of people you could consult in general. You can consult people who are a lot like you, and that most of the people you spend time with are a lot like you. Maybe they live near you. Maybe they have the same background you have. Maybe they're demographically similar to you in terms of ethnicity, wealth, religion, and so on. That's, we tend to have a lot of people around us who are a lot like us. The problem with only speaking to those people is they amplify our strengths, but also our weaknesses. And so they entrench us. If we're stuck already, we're unlikely to get unstuck by speaking only to those people. This is also, by the way, a matter of leadership of how you put together teams. So you've got these people who are... Amplifying you and who are like you, and they're great. It's good to have some of those people around for harmony and whatever else.
37:16 Speaker 04 And you understand each other and there's a lot of benefit to that. But there are two other kinds of people that are really important. One of them is non-redundant people. Non-redundancy in, in the literature basically just means that they're different from you. They're non-overlapping. So I remember when I was a grad student, and still this happens at NYU. When recruiters come to campus, they'll often say, I want the smartest Russian literature student, the smartest organic chemistry student, the smartest mathematician, the smartest marketing student. And I'm going to bring them all together. They can be educated in the area. Let's say it's a hedge fund or a consulting company or whatever it is. But I want them all to think differently and to bring that difference to bear on whatever is going on in this particular case. And so that you've got these people who are like you, people who are different from you. But then you also need a third kind.
38:00 Speaker 04 And Pixar is very well known for doing this with many of its most successful films. You bring in the black sheep. So the black sheep is not just non-redundant. It's someone who says to you, you're wrong. And let me tell you the three flavors of wrong that you are. And this is, let me break it down for you. So in, you know, in Pixar's case, they've got all these people who are amazing at animation. And they'll bring in someone who's a storytelling expert. And that storyteller will say, stop worrying about whether the fur looks like fur and the water looks like water. That's nonsense. No one's going to watch a film because the fur looks like fur. Let's figure out the story. And so they'll push back and that creative tension and the tension in our own lives that we get from people who don't think like us. It's threatening and it can make us feel a little bit unnerved.
38:42 Speaker 04 But if you embrace it, it is the key to getting unstuck is to having that pushback, that conflict, that sort of productive, you want to be polite about it. But you want to have these people around you as well.
38:53 Scott Galloway? So I was late to this because I was interviewing Andrew Ross Orkin. And the two of you actually remind me of each other.
39:03 Speaker 04 Again, I'll take it. Thank you. That's that's high praise.
39:06 Scott Galloway? Well, but you're both sort of the youngest person in that room. You were the youngest, at least at Stern, you were kind of the youngest star. We, no one ever leaves at Stern. They leave feet first, which creates very little opportunity for younger academics, but that's another talk show. But you were considered sort of this young star. You're no longer that young. Andrew's no longer that young. And I would just like very, you in a very open, honest way to speak about what were the attributes that got you so much accelerant so early in your career, looking back on it? And then what are your thoughts around trying to maintain velocity as you're no longer like the young kid on the block?
39:45 Speaker 04 So in my first six months of grad school, this is 20 years ago when I came to the US, I worked entirely, I poured my mind and soul into this one project. And I thought it was going to get published in the best journal and it was going to make me as an academic and I was going to get a job on the back of it as a professor and so on. And I went into my advisor's office and he said to me, I just want you to know that I've got some bad news. This thing that you have been working on, someone else just published that paper. So we're going to start from scratch. And it was the most devastating news. It felt like six months had been for nothing. And so from there on, and I've continued to do this now, the answer to your question is diversification. You are, you are an index fund of yourself. And if you do 10 different things,
40:28 Speaker 04 some of them will not work out. There are aspects of my career that went nowhere, but I do as many things as I can. At least initially, that's the exploring, I guess. And so I, I write books and I consult and I do legal expert testimony and I do the work that I do with section. And when these opportunities come up, you have to say yes, you've got to pursue them and figure out if they're right for you. You don't have to keep all of them forever. You've got to exploit at some point for sure. But I think that diversity, especially early on in your career, when you don't know what's going to pan out, you can only go further with the things that you've tried and made a go of. And so that's been my philosophy ever, ever since that 20 year ago experience of having that sort of profound loss of all that work I'd done. And the question about looking forward.
41:14 Speaker 04 I think I am now in an exploitation phase to an extent. I do a lot of what you said about shoulds. Like I say no to a lot more and I feel very privileged to be able to do that. But I think if you keep enough doors open and you try enough things and you're voracious and omnivorous, you consume everything, at some point you can start saying no to things because some of those things that you've tried will work out. And so that's, I think, been a key across time.
41:40 Scott Galloway? I just wanna, I wanna talk a little bit, I wanna go off script a little bit. I'm disturbed, concerned. I'm a bit of a catastrophist in that I'm naturally a pessimistic person. It strikes me that there is this enormous, there's this epidemic of loneliness and I saw this study. They just absolutely rattled me and that is if you had a choice between a smoker, between being a smoker, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and having friends and being a non-smoker but not having friends, you'd live longer smoking a pack a day and having friends. And now one in seven men don't have a single friend. The number of kids who see their friends every day has been cut in half.
42:19 Scott Galloway? And what are your thoughts on loneliness and as men especially who seem to have a really difficult time forming relationships? What are your thoughts on technology? You've written about technology irresistible as a parent, as a man, as a friend and colleague. What are your thoughts on technology and loneliness?
42:44 Speaker 04 Yes, so I mean, that's, my last book was about technology and screens and that's still a huge part of my interest. And I think that's the rise of technology, the rise of social media platforms has been a big part of that loneliness, that epidemic of loneliness, because that's where most of our social lives live. And it's just an unfulfilling, impoverished version of what it is to have interactions with other people. But I'll say this as well, I moved out of New York to a suburb about five years ago. And my wife and I sort of independently started to meet, she met women and I met men in the town we're in. And she, she formed friendships like that. And I think guys are kind of, they have this sort of carapace of invulnerability. They don't wanna interact with each other in a way that's vulnerable. They don't wanna.
43:27 Speaker 04 One of the things I love about the way you interact, Scott, is you're very real and open about things that are hard for you and and difficulties. And that's really disarming. And there's a there's old research in social psychology that basically shows that to the extent you're willing to give people just a little nugget about yourself, you disclose something about yourself, you're vulnerable. They will do it back. They'll mutually disclose and do that five times and you have like effectively a very good friend. And if you do that over and over again, you form friendships. And so the thing I'm teaching my kids is that it's an illusion that the sort of the alpha person in the group will be the most popular and most liked. That person who's never vulnerable, never forms close relationships. You have to be willing
44:06 Speaker 04 to let it maybe not all hang out, but a good portion of it hang out. And and that's what people really respond to and when they start to feel close to you.
44:13 Scott Galloway? That's very strange. As a man, you feel as if you express affection or admiration for someone else, but it's a zero sum game that you've become less masculine or less impressive. I find women are much better complimenting and just saying, oh, my gosh, you look so beautiful tonight. Like a guy would never say, dude, you look so handsome. We just can't say that. Uh, there's something that's like, oh, that means we're in less, uh, I don't know. It's very strange that we see compassion and love and affection as a zero sum game as men. Are there any, you know, given what you've seen evolve over the last years in terms of technology or society? You know, I I always try and focus on what is the message we can have for a younger professional? Do you have any advice
44:57 Scott Galloway? to your younger self? And as a function of that, advice to younger people who maybe have a decent start, decent job, decent credentialing, but are maybe not feeling stuck, but like I I think any ambitious person will have a lot of periods where they feel like they're not accelerating as quickly as they'd like uh professionally or personally. What would your advice to your younger self be?
45:19 Speaker 04 So I have this research with my colleague Hal Hirschfield at UCLA. And what we found is that when people have a nine at the end of their age, when they're 29, 39, 49, 59, they have this mini crisis and they say, where am I? I'm looking down the barrel of a new decade. Am I doing the things I should be doing? Is my life meaningful and rich? Do I have the friendships I need? And so you see all sorts of extreme behaviour. You see people who've never run signing up for marathons. There's this big spike in 29 and 39 and 49 year old marathon runners. You see a lot of extramarital affairs, so not so good things. You see a lot of different kinds of behaviours spiking in these ages. But the thing that's interesting to me about that research is it suggests the importance of zooming back and figuring things out in moments that are a little bit quieter.
46:03 Speaker 04 And I don't think we do that. I think we act and we're constantly acting and we're all busy. We have demands on our time and attention. And I think taking one day every three months, devoting that day or at least a few hours to saying to yourself, you know, where am I? Let's create this sort of metric. I started here. This is where I was, whether, depending on how old you were after college or when I left my last job or whatever it is when I started this venture. And this is where I am and this is where I need to be. And then think really carefully about whether you're orienting yourself in the right direction. Before you're 29, 39, 49, you don't need to wait for these kind of grand moments to do these kinds of audits. And actually, one of the processes I talk about in this book is known as a friction audit,
46:45 Speaker 04 which is about saying, hey, I'm going to take this day in this quieter moment and I'm going to figure out where there's friction in my life and whether I'm pointing in the right direction. And those are essential because you do that for one day and the next two months and 30 days are pointing in the right direction rather than just like, kind of like a rat in a maze running along towards a dead end. So I think we just as a species don't do enough of that really high level thinking. You've got to build it into your calendar. Put it every three months in your calendar and do it. And spend that time and it'll change your life.
47:19 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back.
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48:29 Speaker 05 It's me, the
48:34 Speaker 05 We don't need the jingle twice. Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars.
48:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.
48:51 Speaker 05 Fine. No one deals more deals than Please stop. Touche.
49:07 Scott Galloway? Algebra of happiness. It's never too late to right a wrong. So in, when was it? I think it was about 20, 20, 22 years ago. I had been kicked off of the board of Red Envelope, the company I started. I got into a war with our venture capitalist, a guy named Mike Moritz from Sequoia Capital. And Mike knew nothing about retail. By the way, I like, I treat my grudges like my plants. I water them, I love them, and I watch them grow. But Mike, who is arguably the most successful venture capitalist in history, came onto the board, a red envelope, and was supporting a, literally an incompetent CEO. And I just couldn't handle it. I was young, I was obnoxious, I'd had some success,
49:51 Scott Galloway? and I couldn't have handled the situation more poorly. And because Mike was a billionaire and I was just some crazy, you know, thirty-four-year-old entrepreneur, the board decided to kick me off the board. And that was devastating for me at the time. I remember when they called me and told me they were kicking me off the board. I was on my way to SFO Airport, and I was in a rental car. And I got out of the rental car and I literally couldn't like, I was trying so hard to process what I do next. Do I call shareholders? Do I call people on the board? Do I call a lawyer? I couldn't even process what had just happened. And I remember standing outside of my rental car,
50:32 Scott Galloway? just standing there, just like for ten or fifteen minutes, just like paralyzed. Like, I didn't even know where the keys were. I didn't know, I couldn't even think about where, like, getting my luggage out of the trunk. I was just so literally paralyzed, not with fear, but a situation I just didn't know how to deal with or process. And, long story short, actually, let's make this long story even longer. I decided to raise a bunch of capital, become the largest shareholder, and then go back and sweep out the board and kick everyone off the board. And over the course of the next two or three years, I did that. That's the fun part. And I like to say the story ends well, where we went on to be able to billion-dollar company, but I was able to take control of the board. And then, two thousand and eight, the Great Financial Recession,
51:17 Scott Galloway? Wells Fargo pulled our credit line. We had a snafu at the port and in one of our warehouses, and we were literally like Chapter 11 in like eleven weeks. Story does not end well. Anyway, anyway, when I initially raised money to become the largest shareholder again in red envelope and sweep out the board, I had a friend put me in contact with some capital sources. And I immediately raised, I think, twenty or thirty million dollars and became the largest shareholder. And I said to him, I said, "Okay, I'll give you some upside in that twenty or thirty million, and I'll pay you fifty grand." And so I sent him twenty-five grand and said, "I'll pay you another twenty-five grand in, I don't know, a year, and you get, I don't know, ten percent of the upside." Boom, shake hands, we're done.
52:00 Scott Galloway? And then all hell broke loose, the stock dove, eventually Chapter 11, I lost a shit ton of money. And he sent me an invoice for the 25 grand, the remaining 25 grand. And I said, boss, I lost so much money here. This was a fucking disaster for everyone. You made 25 grand. I am not going to send you the second payment. You're the only person here who made money. And he was very upset and it put a real strain, basically ended our friendship. And we weren't close friends, but we were friends. And I hadn't spoken to this guy in probably 18 or 20 years. And he reached out to me and said, I listen to Prop G Pod all the time and I just love it. And I just wanted to say, I hope you're well. And in the back of my mind, it had always weighed on me. It had always just
52:43 Scott Galloway? weighed on me that I understand why I didn't pay him, but I never felt right with it. I never felt right with it, nor as I shouldn't have, right? I agreed to pay the guy. And I've decided as I've gotten older, that every person I work with, my aspiration is that they believe after spending time working with me, that they think I'm one of the most talented and generous people they have ever worked with. And I can't control the former talents. There's a lot of dimensions that come into talent, but you can't control generosity. You can't control their perception of it, but you can control your actions and say, what is market? Go further than market. Pay people more than market. Be generous in terms of your views of them, in terms of forgiveness, in terms of compensation. The way I express
53:27 Scott Galloway? affection to people, quite frankly, is money, is by paying them a lot or buying them shit. And I realize how weird that sounds. A lot of virtue signaling going on here. Anyways, I sent him an email saying, look, I owe you 25 grand. And it still never sat well with me that I didn't pay it. So I want to pay it. The NASDAQ is up 60% since whenever it was in the last 18 years. I'm going to give you 40 grand. And I sent it to him. And we just had lunch today. And it wasn't that that repaired the relationship, but it kind of was a signal for reigniting a friendship. And my whole point here is it's never too late. If you fuck up, if you did something
54:08 Scott Galloway? two years ago and you feel bad about it and you never had a chance to apologize. If you have the opportunity to call your dad and say, you know, I really act like a jerk, acted like a jerk. If you have a chance to call your ex-husband and say, you know, five years ago, I was very upset. I was very, this was a hard time for me and I didn't behave in a manner that reflects our relationship or what we had together, and I'm sorry. And the opportunity, when you get a little bit older and you become a little bit more comfortable with your emotions, you become a little bit more reasoned in terms of your ego, recognizing your own deficiencies. When you realize the power of an apology, when you realize the power
54:52 Scott Galloway? of honesty, it just feels right as rain. It is never too late. It is never too late to do the right thing.
55:03 Scott Galloway? This episode was produced by Caroline Shager and Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop Your Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.
55:28 Scott Galloway? When daddy's on the nitrous, I totally bond with my hygienists. I find out about their lives, where they come from, and I turn into an extrovert. I should just carry around a gas tank of nitrous wherever I go. Oh my God, genius, genius. I once went to a bachelor party where someone brought a canister of nitrous. You know, made things better, made for a good time, made for a good time.
Previous Office Hours: Are Young Professionals Leaving New York? Leveraging AI in Your Business, and Should You Hire a Career Coach? Next No Mercy / No Malice: Isn’t That Spatial? Page updated September 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
