Protecting Your Portfolio in a Bubble, and Is a Move to America Worth the Money?

Starting this week, Office Hours features more questions per episode and airs exclusively on Mondays. Scott Galloway breaks down how to invest in an overvalued market, whether to leave Sweden for a U. S. career, what he got wrong as a new manager, how to sell a small business at a premium, and how to succeed as an adjunct professor. Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to [email protected], or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. Plus, you can now call or text Scott a question at our new Office Hours hotline: ‪(201) 472-3656‬. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 1:44Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to Office Hours with Prof G, where we answer questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you have a question, send us a voice recording at officehourswithpropgmedia.com or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit. We just might feature it in an upcoming episode. Question number one comes from WhiskeyEjack. All right. Hey Scott, longtime listener and fan. For someone who has done all the right things in the realm of investment for my entire life, it's starting to feel like the American economy is a ticking time bomb. Can you give me some feedback on why that might be an irrational or emotional feeling? Even adverse portfolio is starting to feel unsafe. I could handle a short-term 20% drop. How sure are you that we can bounce back and that a dollar-cost-average approach can still be the right way to invest in the coming years?

• 2:30Scott Galloway?

  I think everyone's asking this question. But as my friends at Ritholtz Management, Barry Ritholtz and Josh Brown say, if you had bought stocks on days where they hit all-time highs, you'd be up, you would have outperformed the market. In other words, yeah, is the market overvalued? Yes, but do we know when it's going to correct? No, and trying to time the market has proven to be impossible. And kind of the best strategy is to always be in the market, but perhaps when it gets this frothy by most traditional metrics, or all traditional metrics, you may want to think about further diversifying such that if and when there is a correction, you have the Kevlar diversification. But trying to guess when the top happens is dangerous.

• 3:13Scott Galloway?

  Probably my biggest investment mistake was the emotional reaction I had to the 2016 election of Donald Trump. I think that Donald Trump, and by the way, I've lost a lot of viewers here. I think it pays to be more tempered and not talk about politics on a show like this. But in sum, I think the president is a fucking idiot and a stain on the American experience and that the grand sum of all of these head-up-your-ass economic and foreign policy decisions will eventually crash this economy or result in long-term structural damage that will take decades, if not generations, to repair. So when he was elected in 2016, I sold all my stocks.

• 3:58Scott Galloway?

  That was stupid. The market ripped for the next year. There was so much insecurity about him actually winning that the fear had been priced in, stocks ripped up. The government is, or the economy is, an iceberg where I think 90 to 95% of it is below the surface. And what the government does does matter, but the majority of the economy just grinds on regardless of who is tweeting what or not tweeting what, or who has prostate cancer, doesn't have prostate cancer. By the way, that made sense for Joe Biden to run again. Who gets metastatic prostate cancer? 81-year-olds or 82? Gee, when will these people just? If all of a sudden, every person over the age of 72 had to resign, if we had to lose Netanyahu, Putin, and Trump, would the world be worse off?

• 4:42Scott Galloway?

  Anyways, enough already. But what we had for me was an emotional decision and I sold everything. I had, at that point, a lot of capital gains. So immediately, I lost probably 20. I was living in New York at the time. So I lost probably a third of the gains to taxes. And then six months later, I ended up buying back in at a market that was 10% or 20% more expensive. So you could argue, at least notionally, that decision cost me 40% of my liquid net worth in stocks. So what do you do when you think things are way overvalued? You diversify. But I think you always want to be in the market. If you wanted some insurance, you could try and get sophisticated and buy some long-dated puts or maybe sell covered calls against your existing positions.

• 5:24Scott Galloway?

  But generally speaking, I think what you want to do is diversify and recognize that just being in the S&P is not diversification because 40% of it is in a small number of companies. Valuations are elevated. The Cape Ratio, that's the price of the market divided by 10 years of company earnings, adjusted for inflation. It's meant to smooth out spikes.

• 5:46Scott Galloway?

  It tells you how many years of profits you're paying for a dollar of earnings. The long-run average is about 17, and get this, right now it's 41. That's the second highest in 145 years. Guess when the highest was? You got it, December of 1999. However, it's a bit of a poor timing signal again because when it's high, sometimes it goes much higher. I think you want to stay in the market. The current economy has been described as K-shaped. The line for wealthier households invested in the stock market is going up, end of the right, and the line for everyone else is flat or going down. In other words, wealth concentration may be an argument for owning productive assets, not abandoning them. You want to be part of that upper part of the K and in assets, be an owner.

• 6:29Scott Galloway?

  The biggest difference in our economy is we keep transferring wealth and opportunity from the owners to the earners. At some point, that's, you know, that is going to collapse on itself. How confident should you be in a bounce back? Recovery isn't always quick. It took about four years after 2000 and about four years after 2007. And we've had decades through the latter half of the last century where the market was essentially flat. But the evidence is clear. Continuing to buy beats stepping aside. And over the medium and long term, you want to be in the market, just diversified. Having said that, I am taking down my leverage.

• 7:11Scott Galloway?

  I, you know, leverage is how smart people go broke, and I'm being diversified. And right now, I'm in a different stage of life. I'm not looking to get rich, I'm looking to not get poor. I try to not have more than 5% of my assets in any one thing. I'm over-invested in real estate, but I have no leverage on the real estate, so I can endure a down cycle. And I'm fairly diversified across asset classes. I try to diversify out of America. And quite frankly, that's been a bad strategy so far for me. Those stocks are down. But I've decided that I want to sleep at night and I want to diversify. Most people, well, most people get wealthy through concentration of their human capital and they go 110% all-in on one thing. But once you get an asset base of any real wealth,

• 7:54Scott Galloway?

  I would argue that the most underappreciated word in the English and investing language is the following: diversification. Thanks for the question. Question number two comes from OppositeSpeaker8200 on Reddit. They say, "Hi Scott, I'm 41 and living in Stockholm with my wife and two young children. I have a PhD in life science and about seven years of commercial experience working in sales towards pharma and biotech. I keep coming back to one question, should we make a big move to the US? If you were in my position, 41 years old, with two young kids, a solid career, and a comfortable life in Sweden, would you take the risk and move to the US in pursuit of greater opportunity or accept that the grass may simply look greener from Stockholm? Thank you for a great show." Okay, so without knowing your specific situation,

• 8:39Scott Galloway?

  the trade off of the fulcrum here is that the US offers a much larger life sciences market and potentially greater financial upside, specifically stock options in a more robust, private equity-driven market in pharma, right? You'd rather be good to great in the US than average in Stockholm. And by the way, the majority of us are average. The US is one of the world's largest biopharmaceutical markets and a global leader in research and development. US biopharmaceutical companies spent $96 billion on R and D in 2023 and counting for over 20% of total sales. In 2025, the US biotech sector hit $232 billion in revenues with over 72 different companies generating more than $500 million in sales.

• 9:23Scott Galloway?

  However, Sweden also has a significant life sciences industry. The sector accounts for about 10% of the country's exports and its market size has doubled since 2022 to $474 billion, or about $50 billion US. Is that kroner? What are they called? Is it kroner up there? By the way, I was just in Stockholm. Jesus Christ, I was there in July. I'll move. Let's swap. Oh, my God, that's a beautiful city. Jesus Christ. On their bikes, roaming around, everyone's, "Hi, how are you? Yeah, I'm great, enjoying all this free healthcare. How about you?" Anyway, UNICEF ranks the US 40th out of 41 wealthy countries for the quality, accessibility, and affordability of its childcare system. In some, if you don't have a support system or the money to hire a support system, the US sucks to have kids.

• 10:07Scott Galloway?

  Nordic countries ranked near the top. Sweden also devotes a much larger share of its economy to early childhood education and care, 1.5% of its GDP compared with just a quarter of a percent in the US. Look, this is what it comes right down to. The first is, do you have alignment with your partner? I'm in London. I don't want to be in fucking London. It's raining outside and 55 degrees, sea above London. But my partner really wanted to live here. And I figured out early that my role in life is to make my kids and my partner happy, not because I'm a good person, but because it makes me happy when they're happy. Do you have alignment with your partner? Does she really want to go? Does she have a great support system in Stockholm and is going to be upset, living in the US? Or is she ready for a new adventure? Get alignment with your partner. That way, if it doesn't work out, that's okay.

• 10:52Scott Galloway?

  You both agreed to it. And if it does work out, you can both celebrate your collective victory. Do you have the money or the professional currency to get the kind of job that's going to help you make up for the socialist gap? The socialist gap being free healthcare and childcare. That's real cabbage. If you got a great offer from Pfizer or Merck or some cool, or Gilead or whatever, that's not going to be an issue. You will have the cabbage to do it, and there is more upside for the extremely talented and/or the extremely lucky in the United States. The reason why Nordic countries always score towards the top in terms of a general happiness across their population is that in America, we've decided the key to happiness is how

• 11:36Scott Galloway?

  much shit you have. Whereas the Nordic countries have figured out that happiness is not only a function of your stuff, but it's a function of an absence of anxiety of things being taken from you. So if you have the alignment and the market currency to get the cabbage in the US, to fill in that socialist gap and take away that anxiety, then brother, at 41, if you have alignment, I say roll and come to the US. In general, after having molested the earth for the last 35 years as a strategy consultant and investor, my reductive analysis of the world is the following. The US is the best place in the world to make money, and Europe is the best place to spend it. It sounds as if you're still in the making money part of your life.

• 12:20Scott Galloway?

  So if you have the opportunity and the currency and the offer, do it. Also, let the market decide. You're going to need more money in the US, substantially more money. Do you have an offer for more money? If you do, then boom, America, here we come. If not, then it's great to live in Stockholm with a wife and kids. This is the mother of all good problems. Do I stay in one of the most beautiful, empathetic cities in the world with a wife and kids and have a lovely life? Or do I go for it and move to the US? And if things don't work out, you can always pull the ripcord and move back still as a fairly young man with a young family to Stockholm. Again, what's the fulcrum here? The market.

• 13:03Scott Galloway?

  Got to get alignment with your partner, but assuming you have that, does the market value your currency, your professional currency enough in the US to make up for that gap in social services? Thanks for the question and best of luck to you. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Built. Everyone loves points. It's like a little gift from your past self who spent money on things you needed. So why not get rewards from something that's typically a thankless expense, your rent or mortgage? Built has your back for exactly that. They've expanded from their original rent and rewards program, and they have a lot more going on for members now. For one, members can earn points on mortgage payments, too. Every housing payment earns you points.

• 13:47Scott Galloway?

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• 14:29Scott Galloway?

  You're working on incorporating AI into your workflow, and you have a project you need help with, so you go to the AI platform, open a new tab, start from scratch, and re-explain everything from the top every single time. Wouldn't it be better if the AI was there from the start, so you don't have to explain and re-explain the project when you need help? Superhuman Go wants to save you from that tedium. Superhuman Go comes from the makers of Grammarly. It can embed in the tools you and your team already use, always ready to help without having you switch apps or break your flow. It can help you make sense of a dense message thread, help you get ready for a meeting, or catch a typo before you hit send. And when you get stuck, Go can help you brainstorm, outline, or review relevant context so you don't lose your place. It's basically an AI assistant that's always on, always ready to help.

• 15:13Scott Galloway?

  Bottom line, Superhuman is built for people who take their work seriously and expect their tools to do the same. You can try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly. Find more at superhuman.com. Support for the show comes from Gusto. When you run a small business, you don't just do the job, you are the job. You're the hiring manager, payroll department, benefits team, maybe even the custodian. It's time to let Gusto take a few of those off your plate quickly and seamlessly. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay, hire onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Automatic payroll, tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers' comp 401K, you name it, Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every

• 15:58Scott Galloway?

  budget. Unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price. That means no hidden fees and no surprises. You can save time with built-in automated tools, offer letters, onboarding docs, direct deposit, and more. It's quick and simple to switch to Gusto. Just transfer your existing data to get up and running fast. Plus, you don't have to pay a cent until you run your first payroll. Try Gusto today at gusto.com/provg and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com/provg. One more time, gusto.com/provg. Welcome back. Our next question comes from a listener who texted us. They say, "Howdy, Scott. I recall from a previous episode that you would describe yourself as a bad manager when you first found yourself in those roles.

• 16:43Scott Galloway?

  What do you think you did a bad job of? And how would you have done things differently now? Any advice for new managers?" I think I was so self-absorbed that I thought that people would just take for granted that I would do the right thing, that I didn't need to outline their career for them, that I would do the right thing and be generous when, you know, if things worked out and they should just keep their head down. I didn't take enough time to kind of sit down and really focus on, quite frankly, on them. What are you hoping to achieve here? This is what we have planned for you. This is the career path. This is how the company is doing. This is why the company's success is going to translate to your success.

• 17:25Scott Galloway?

  I looked at people as a transaction, and a lot of this is out of necessity. If I didn't have more money, if I spent more money than I took in when I started my first strategy firm, I was closing the company. I didn't have rich parents. I didn't have any money saved. Now I have a lot of cushion, and I can, quite frankly, I can overcompensate people. But what I didn't do that I could have done was a better job of outlining objectives, ensuring they understood I've had a better feel for what was important to them. I assumed that everyone was like me and wanted to be rich and awesome. That's all I've ever wanted to be. And then what you realize as you get older is some people want flexibility. Some people want to manage others, like they get really excited about the opportunity to manage somebody, even if it's them managing the office manager.

• 18:09Scott Galloway?

  Some people want their name in lights. And if the New York Times calls and asks for a quote, we used to do a lot of content marketing, turning it over or referring it to one of the analysts, a younger analyst, it just makes their day. Praise. I didn't invest enough in praise, for God's sakes. Young people need watering, telling people they're doing a good job. I just, I was so self-absorbed and assumed that everybody just thought, oh, he's awesome, and when he gets successful, he'll be nice to all of us. I should have done a much better job understanding their priorities, investing in their desires, and really taking time to understand what their unique needs were, outlining what was going on in the company and how that success was going to translate to their success, and proving to them with my actions that I understood their priorities and I was trying

• 18:54Scott Galloway?

  to adapt to it. One thing I did do well, in the 90s, before it was cool... I hired a lot of mothers, a lot of women with graduate degrees from Darden, from Tuck, who had left the brand management world, corporate America, Nestle, or P and G, or Clorox. My company was in San Francisco. And I would say to them, "Come into the office two days a week, and you can stay at home three days a week and be with your kids and work remotely." This was like really innovative at the time. This was sort of unheard of. Nestle wouldn't allow them to do that. And what I found is there is no one more productive than a mother. They gotta get home. Like, the babysitter is leaving at six. They don't have time

• 19:37Scott Galloway?

  to mess about at work. And I found that there was this talent pool. I didn't do it because I was progressive or a feminist. I did it because it was an untapped labor pool of exceptionally talented people who wouldn't go to work. You know, I could compete with Nestle, or P and G, or Google, because I was offering the flexibility that those firms didn't. That's an example of a good manager. Also, something I also got right as I got older, I was talking to my partner in the business, Catherine Dillon. We've always been a little bit, now that our employees, the team's gonna love to hear this, we've always been a little bit the island of misfit toys. We just have some really fucking strange people working with us. And that's okay. They don't fit. A lot of them don't

• 20:22Scott Galloway?

  fit the corporate mold in terms of how they look, smell, or feel, or the way they behave. We have had some real pieces of work, to be kind. And the one thing they've all had in common is that they're all talented. They're all good at what they do. And if they're a bit odd, a bit socially awkward, that's fine. And that was also a key advantage early on, was pulling together this kind of, this, I don't know you would call it, island of misfit toys. But it not only made for an interesting organization, but also, I think it made for a high-performing organization. We didn't need, you know, you walk into any company I started,

• 21:06Scott Galloway?

  it does not look like Goldman Sachs. It's people from unknown colleges. It's people who just wouldn't, I don't think, desire nor be appreciated in a more traditional corporate world. So I do think that's something we got right. What is the key to being a good manager? One, you have to demonstrate excellence. And that is not only you have to be really good at something, you have to be willing to do anything you would ask of anybody else. And that is demonstrate excellence. I call it player coach, pulling up a chair, showing them how to do something. You have to demonstrate excellence. People want to follow success. Two, accountability, a willingness to fire people. Everyone talks about strategic hiring and all this bullshit, hippie dippy Brooklyn sandal bullshit of, "Oh, they're in the wrong

• 21:50Scott Galloway?

  role." No, fire them. In a small company, if they're not working, get rid of them. And that may sound Darwinian and horrible. Fine. You're not doing anyone any favors by letting someone's career go sideways. Be generous once you decide to shed them. But everybody in the organization doesn't need to like each other, but they need to look left and look right and say, "Okay, I get why they're here. They're good at what they do." And when you don't hold the underperformers accountable, the upper performers, the top performers, stop working as hard and go somewhere else where they can be rewarded for their outperformance. And then finally, and this is where I fucked up, empathy. What is it you want out of this job? I know you're, like me, concerned with your own success and your own economic security. Here is how you're gonna get there. Here's how the company is

• 22:34Scott Galloway?

  doing. Here's maybe your share of the profits or your equity. But always giving them a sense that they're appreciated and that they're part of something. And, you know, creating an environment also, something I learned, where young people can be social and enjoy themselves. It's a little bit harder with remote work, but I think we're a social animal and giving kids an excuse to gather or do fun or social stuff together. All of our team is going to the US Open. I think that's, that investment has a huge ROI, because I think especially if you have a younger pop, I just want to go home. I don't, but what you realize is young people want to meet, they want to hang out, they want to make friends. I think that's also kind of a hack if you have a young organization. Anyways,

• 23:19Scott Galloway?

  hope that helps. But yeah, I would describe myself as a B minus manager. I think I got to B plus, but I was smart enough to know what I didn't know. And I've always hired and held on to people who were, who were good managers. Thanks for the question. Our next question comes from Long Jumping Ant 570. I get these names. On Reddit, they say, "Hi, Scott. I own a small manufacturing business that builds a niche consumer product. We have a company interested in acquiring us. They are a larger and more well-known brand manufacturer who builds a complementary product. We are smaller than we could be, but we have a number of strategic advantages, such as being the only manufacturer of our product outside of Europe, or US-based. I believe that if this company acquires us, the strength of their brand would lead to a 10x of sales almost overnight. It would

• 24:03Scott Galloway?

  not be practical for them to build our capabilities on their own. My question is, do you have any advice on getting a buyer to value a small company based on its strategic positioning and future earnings as opposed to more traditional valuation methods such as a multiple of past EBITDA? Thanks." Yeah, the way you get them to appreciate your future earnings and you get what I'd call an irrational multiple is with a second bidder. And that is where hiring a banker pays off. And I don't know if you're big enough to afford hiring a banker, or sometimes I just hired a very good deal attorney. But your ability to create the illusion of multiple bidders is the only way you're going to get your price up. I mean, obviously, you want to put together a good data room and a good book, but if they're already interested in you, they already see the potential here. And obviously, you're gonna want to sell it

• 24:47Scott Galloway?

  hard. But there's only two things you have to remember in a negotiation. One, don't turn it into win/lose, right? No, there's nothing wrong here. You're good, we're good. There's just not a fit, right? And looking at, you know, trying to get the better of people. I've always left a little bit of money on the table in negotiations, because what I realize is you don't want the other partner to feel like they lost, or to feel like they've been abused, or be an asshole about it. Whenever I was selling a company, I was just, I don't know, I was sort of a win/lose. And then you realize that you want to sell to smart people. Anyways, what do you want to do here? Potentially find a banker that can create, if you have, if they're the only potential buyer, they smell

• 25:28Scott Galloway?

  it, and it's not as much a negotiation as it is just sort of, they'll keep grinding you down until you walk away. And that's the second part around not making it a win/lose. The number two thing is always show a credible willingness to walk away. Yeah, we'd love to get the deal done. You're the right partner. You'd be great for us. We'd be great for you. But maybe there's just not a fit here. Very few deals get done at a good number, where one or both parties didn't walk away at some point. And when I sold Altuto to Gartner, they came back and they made another acquisition and said, "Well, we want to keep the deal in place. We just want to extend the closing period for six months." In other words, they wanted a free option to lock in a price for another six months while we

• 26:09Scott Galloway?

  were growing, but then five and a half months in, they could walk away. And I said, "Fuck you, and we're out." And I sent them a letter saying, "The deal is over. The exclusivity period is over, and we're gonna go to one of many other suitors." By the way, we started with three suitors. One pulled their LOI, one pulled their term sheet. I think it was Anderson or Accenture, one of those big firms that pays their top person 40 million and everyone else $4 in India. And then the second company was, God, I forget their name. I'm gonna hate myself. They were this great little firm that did surveys in DC. Not great. They were a big firm. They got acquired by Gartner, who was the third bidder. So I

• 26:52Scott Galloway?

  went from three bidders to one overnight. And all of a sudden, my negotiating leverage went way down. But the acquirer didn't know that. And I said, "I'm out. I'm done." And they came back and ultimately acquired us at eight times revenues, which was a very rich multiple at the time. And there's a whole list of things you do to get your multiple up, which I'll go into another podcast. But one, don't let it be win or lose. Two, always show a credible willingness to walk away. And if you're looking for a valuation, you're gonna do a good job of showing why you're special. They probably already know that. But at the end of the day, your valuation is a function of what the seller and the buyer are each willing to pay. And the buyer's willingness to stretch is gonna be based on one thing mostly, and that is the perceived, or the perception, that there are multiple

• 27:36Scott Galloway?

  bidders for your company. So what do you want to do? You want to figure out a way, if you can manufacture a second and/or third bidder. And that is reach out to a potential universe of acquirers and say, and always tell the truth. I find that the truth has a nice ring to it. Say, "We have a credible inbound opportunity for acquisition. We thought we would talk to you before doing a deal." Now, if you're in an exclusive and they have a preemptive strike, that's basically saying, "All right, take us off the table at a good number." If they don't get to a number, then say you're gonna open up the process to multiple bidders, and then go out with the, "Are you interested? Speak now or forever hold your peace." But the way you get an irrational number, and that's what every seller wants, is an irrational premium on their company, is to create the perception or an actual feeding

• 28:20Scott Galloway?

  frenzy where there's multiple bidders. Anyways, good for you. It sounds like you're gonna sell. I can read from the body language here that you think this is a good idea. Also, based on a previous question, multiples in the market across every sector are probably a little bit artificially inflated. No one ever feels as if their company is overvalued right now. And I don't know the specifics of your deal, but I think it's safe to say, in general, valuations are lofty right now. In other words, it's a really good time to be a seller. Thanks for the question.

• 28:52Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

• 29:00Scott Galloway?

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• 30:12Scott Galloway?

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• 31:14Scott Galloway?

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• 31:37Speaker 04

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• 32:24Scott Galloway?

  We're back. Our final question comes from Oscar de Grouse on Reddit. It's genius. "Prof G, what advice would you give to a new but old adjunct professor? I'm a corporate guy who recently started teaching a 200-level operations management class at a local university. Based on your experience, what are some key do's and don'ts?" So I joined the faculty at NYU as an adjunct professor in 2002. I was paid $12,000. I taught brand strategy. You get a rating at the end of the course. I think 22 people signed up for my class, and I got a 4.7. And the head of my department called me and said, "We're going to give you one more shot, but if you don't get your ratings up, we're not going to be able to renew your contract,

• 33:06Scott Galloway?

  great contract at $12,000 a year." And I absolutely molested the comments, tore them apart, figured out what I was doing right, what I was doing wrong. And quite frankly, as an adjunct, your power is simple. The do's are the following. Put more butts in seats. Get really good at teaching. There is no silver bullet. Figure out how to turn it into an outstanding, iconic class. Over the course of the next, I'd call it, three to five years, I became one of the ringers. What's a ringer? We have 190 faculty at NYU Stern. There are kind of five or six professors that are ringers that everybody takes regardless of whether they're interested in that field or not. Every finance person took brand strategy.

• 33:47Scott Galloway?

  My course, every marketing major took valuation with Aswath Damodaran. There was a small number, and everybody knew them, and I became one of those. My classes went from 22 people to 180, only because that's what the maximum the class held. And I consistently scored in kind of low sixes. And that was my power. And slowly but surely, I went from adjunct or associate adjunct to adjunct to instructor to associate instructor to associate clinical, then to clinical. And now, on NYU's website, I got the ultimate promotion. It just says "Professor of Marketing." Academia is the only industry where they take away titles and prefixes as a promotion.

• 34:30Scott Galloway?

  And by the time I left, when I say I left, in 2017, I sold L2, and I gave back all of the compensation I'd received at that point because I didn't want... I like higher education. I like NYU. I like the people there. I had money. And I just liked the idea of teaching out of love, out of concern for society. Anyways, I gave all the money back, and I've never accepted a dollar of compensation since then, which is also wonderful because they have absolutely no leverage over me. They literally have to ask me to do anything. They can't tell me to do anything. I used to teach five courses a year. So basically, I just kind of do what I want. But by the time I left, in addition to me bragging, I was making around $200,000, $240,000 a year.

• 35:15Scott Galloway?

  Plus, I had the biggest benefit. I had a three-bedroom in Washington Square Village. Is that what it's called? It's this building. It's this giant superblocks in Soho that look like public housing in Gdansk, Poland. But I had a three-bedroom with two terraces, basically for free, which I figured this was about $150,000 or $200,000 benefit. So anyways, all in, you could argue I was making somewhere between, call it, $350,000 and $500,000 a year. And it was a great platform for me, and I really enjoyed it. I still enjoy it. So I went from $12,000 a year to much more than that. Why? I was able to put butts in seats. School is a business. When I walk in, if there's 180 kids,

• 35:57Scott Galloway?

  that means every night, the school is charging about $100,000 to $110,000 for me to deliver two hours and 40 minutes on brand strategy. They know that. That is really good for them. That helps them support a lot of useless tenured professors and a lot of administrative bloat, where people on the 12th floor of Stern think big thoughts about things like student engagement. So they need those ringers. So this is what you want to do. You want to tear apart your student evaluations. Obviously, being kind of a player in the private sector helps, but that's much harder. And you want to just become a great professor that becomes a great teacher. You're not tenure-track. Research isn't going to do anything. You know, you're a little bit older, so trying to have greater presence in the private sector

• 36:42Scott Galloway?

  is probably going to be difficult at this point. In sum, you just have to be great in the classroom. It helps to be engaged and helpful in office hours and try and be thoughtful and help people, you know, whatever it is, find jobs or understand the topic better. But at the end of the day, boss, you are an adjunct. Two-thirds, by the way, of professors at universities are adjuncts because they underpay us. See above, university bloat and tenure. But the silver bullet here, and the only silver bullet, is you've got to be great at what you do. And at the end of the day, you're an adjunct. You're there to teach, full stop. Thanks for the question and good luck. That's all for this episode. To submit a question for next time, email a voice recording to [email protected].

• 37:26Scott Galloway?

  Again, that's [email protected] or post it on the Scott Galloway subreddit. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez, Laura Janir, and Asher Schwartz. Our editor is Brad Williams. Kami Reek is our social producer. Juba Rose is our technical director, and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thanks for listening to the Prop G Pod from Prop G Media.

• 37:55Speaker 05

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