How the Prof G Pod Gets Made, What Does It Mean to Be Rich? and What Really Matters in Hiring

Scott kicks things off with a behind-the-scenes look at how The Prof G Pod comes together. He then unpacks what it really means to be a “baller.” Finally, he shares thoughts on what actually matters when hiring new talent, including how we hire here at Prof G Media. Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to [email protected], or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:01Speaker 02

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• 1:30Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to Office Hours with Prop G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. Just a reminder, you can now catch Office Hours every Monday and Friday. That's two episodes a week, Monday and Friday. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehourswithpropgmedia.com. Again, that's officehourswithpropgmedia.com. Or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit and we just might feature it in our next episode. First question.

• 2:00Scott Galloway?

  Our first question comes from MissionAlt99 on Reddit. They ask,

• 2:06Scott Galloway?

  "I'd love to learn more about how you produce all the podcasts from selecting guests, scheduling pre-production to post-production of each episode. How is the team structured for Prof G? And how do you think about producing a high volume of content across brands? Basically, when the recording session ends, what happens next?" Okay, so I'll go through some of the tactics and then I'll speak to more kind of big picture issues. We put out, why do we put out, I don't know, 12 or 14 podcasts a week. Our podcast universe is Pivot, which is with my co-host Kara Swisher. Vox owns the IP there, so we can't, you know, take it and go somewhere else. And then I started a portfolio

• 2:47Scott Galloway?

  of podcasts. There's Prof G, which is this. So the adjuncts of Prof G are the following. Prof G Conversations, which is generally a long-form interview. Prof G Markets, which is with my co-host Ed Elson. We specifically talk about the markets and stocks. Prof G Raging Moderates, which is a political podcast associated with Jessica Tarloff. Office Hours, which is my favorite, which is, you know, this, where people just write in and we try to give them unfiltered, no mercy, no malice advice or responses to their questions. And then No Mercy, No Malice, which is George Hahn reading over my newsletter that I put out every Friday. We get a lot of inbound inquiry to be on the show because we've aggregated

• 3:29Scott Galloway?

  a fairly large audience and we tend to hit young, wealthy men which are, who are impossible to reach because they're all avoiding commercials by being on Netflix and Spotify. So the great white rhino of the consumer economy and then the election is our audience. Our audience is, the average, is a 34-year-old male who makes $150,000 a year. That is, quite frankly, a baller. That is somebody that brands want to reach because they're in their mating years and spending money on stupid shit like coffee and watches and shoes and... I don't know, SaaS-based software because they want to be more attractive to mates or get promoted or scale their business. We're pretty, are we ruthless around guests? We want to find guests that are, we like famous people, yes, but more than that, we're

• 4:12Scott Galloway?

  trying to find people that other people haven't heard of before. So I really, I love when we find an interesting young person who, so Kyla Scanlon, the economist on TikTok, this, I think she's like 26, reminds me of Ed, I think she's fantastic, so we bring her on regularly. Alice Hahn, this China analyst from Green Mantle, I think she's just a huge find, we've had her on three times now. So Aswath Damodaran, who's probably been on more than anyone else, I just think he's fascinating and I don't know if you know Aswath, he's a colleague at NYU, but he's the best, hands down the best teacher there, maybe one of the best teachers in the world. So I would rather find someone that people don't know than I, when people come on, some famous CEO comes on, I'm like, okay, boss, you're fucking everywhere.

• 4:56Scott Galloway?

  What are you going to tell me you haven't said everywhere in the last 48 hours? So we try to thread the needle between someone that people are interested in hearing from and someone who's not just whoring themselves out everywhere, which is hard because people don't want to come on their podcast unless they're in whore stage, if you will. Lot of effort goes into guests. Now, people think that I am someone who works around the clock and produces just a ton of content on my own. The key to all of this and the key in business is a very simple statement. Greatness is in the agency of others. Prof G is, I think, 14 or 16 full-time people and probably six or eight contractors, video producers or video editors, podcast producers, data analysts.

• 5:41Scott Galloway?

  Catherine Dillon runs the business, editors, fact checkers, finance people. I have a tech guy who follows me around the world and makes sure that everything sounds good and is well-lit. So we have a ton of people that much, you know, much less the co-hosts. So these people give our stuff scale and make it professional. So we also have to coordinate with the other pods. I'm always traveling. We try to record the same time each week and punch out a bunch of stuff. So usually I'll sit down and five hours later for Prof G and office hours. I have a bunch of stuff that will trickle out during the week and then we throw it over the wall to our video team that slices and dices it.

• 6:24Scott Galloway?

  And then they throw it over the wall to our social media team that then just snakes it through all the different channels. I work a lot less hard than people think. I'm very good at not working. I worked pretty much around the clock for, I don't know, 25 years of my life, call it 25 to 50. And I decided to kind of get off that hamster wheel and now have a team of people that does all this. So what you're listening to now, I started recording about two minutes after I sat down and two minutes after it's over, I will leave. Not because I have work after for two minutes, but I like to make everyone laugh and I don't know, I try to tell a bunch of bad jokes for a couple of minutes after the show ends. And then everyone else starts to work. We're even talking about having a producer here on London such that when the production

• 7:07Scott Galloway?

  teams end at midnight in the US, we go, you know, it's 5:00 AM here, someone wakes up here and can begin working. And with Prop G Markets, we're going to daily, so we're really going to have a lot of content, if you will. I'm thinking about launching two more podcasts. I'd like to do a Prop G China podcast. I'd like to do a Prop G Economics podcast because we're good at this. We have an infrastructure. I find it interesting. And while I thought I was just going to have sort of some fun with this, it's turning into a real business. The total portfolio does, I'm open about money. I think it's important people know how to make money and understand it. If you want to be wealthy, you got to become financially literate and start talking about money. The whole portfolio will probably do about, I don't know, 17 or 20 million dollars this

• 7:52Scott Galloway?

  year. It's a very profitable business. It's very much a winner take all business. It takes years to build these things and just 10 podcasts are responsible or capture a third of all listenership and I bet the top 100 capture two thirds. So the 1.6 million podcasts, 600,000 put out content every week. So 5,999,900 are fighting over one third of the listener base. That's how difficult it is. I think it's probably easier to become an NBA player than it is to have a successful podcast at this point. But if you're blessed with having a successful podcast, it's a very lucrative business because the means of production here, I did an analysis for every one person we have, we get about 50,000

• 8:33Scott Galloway?

  downloads or listeners. And I did the same analysis across Comcast and Disney and they're getting about 10 or 15,000 views or listens for every one person or employee they have. So the means of production are more efficient here. And so while these are small business, 20 million dollars isn't a big business, it's very, very profitable. It's growing 20 to 30% a year. And I think that, and now my greed glands are going again. I'm starting to think about launching new podcasts, packaging it all. And we're very, we're a disciplined company. You know, we try to make great content. We try to be fearless. We try to be entertaining. One of our cultural standards is we overcompensate people. People

• 9:14Scott Galloway?

  never think they're overcompensated, but they are. At least here at Prof G, we are to a certain extent monetizing my brand and background. We get exceptional advertiser rates. If you just run ads on you, you know, in an ad network or on AdSense, you're getting $2 or $3 CPMs. We get between $30 and $50 CPMs because see above, we get this incredibly attractive audience and we make really good money. And I don't want to go through the hassle of hiring and firing and upscaling. So we hire good people I've worked with for a long time or that come highly recommended. We pay them 30 to 50% above market and they don't leave. And I find that's just an easier, more enjoyable way to run a business and your life, so to speak. So I don't do it to be a good, I do, I try to do it to be grateful

• 9:58Scott Galloway?

  and put money back into the economy. But it's also, I think, a business strategy that works if you're blessed with a company that's really. Profitable, and it's all a bit of a flywheel. The podcast creates speaking opportunities. I make about four million bucks a year speaking. I charge an average of about 125,000, 150,000 a speaking gig. I do about 30 a year, 25 a year. The books, I make about a million, million, two on each book. Is that right? Maybe a million and a half, including international. And obviously, the podcasts, the podcasts and the speaking support the books. And then the newsletter that goes out every week, we don't monetize it. We've just started monetizing. We're making about eight or 10,000 a newsletter doing a, getting an advertiser sponsor. That goes out to about 300, 350,000 people.

• 10:41Scott Galloway?

  It used to be half a million, and then we cleaned out the people who weren't, hadn't opened in a month. A lot of bots. And it all is sort of a flywheel, right? The downloads inspire more book sales. The book sales inspire more speaking gigs. The speaking gigs, you know, inspire more newsletter, newsletter more downloads. And the wheel flies, right? So we're trying to create a kind of a content flywheel that supports it. But yeah, it's a nice business. It's a media business. And once you hit a certain scale, it's very profitable. But no, again, let me just finish where I started. Greatness is in the agency of others. What you're seeing or what you're hearing is about an hour and a half of my time. And I would bet every episode is somewhere between 20 and 40 hours of someone else's time.

• 11:25Scott Galloway?

  Even the person who runs this company, Catherine, tends to list almost everything. There's video editors involved, sound engineers, the producer who lined up the guest, who got the questions from Reddit. As you can imagine, it's a decent lift. But like anything, the only really rewarding things, the only way you make a lot of money, the only way you have really interesting life is pretty much directly correlated to just how fucking hard something is. And this is, this is that. Thanks for the question. Question number two. Our second question comes from prettyafternoon7898 on Reddit, and they say,

• 12:02Scott Galloway?

  Dear Scott, you mentioned the word baller a lot. Just said it. When describing someone who makes a good income, what is your exact definition of baller? What income level do you need to have to be a baller in your view?

• 12:15Scott Galloway?

  Oh, I don't know. That's sort of a amorphous term. Let me start with, what does it mean to be rich? Being rich is having passive income greater than your burn, such that your days are yours, that you can... So I am rich. Why am I rich? Because the interest, the income I get from some of the real estate investments I get, passive income, and the income I get from my investment base, which is also passive income, is now greater than my burn. Once you have that, you're rich. Because what that means is you have an absence of fear that if you lose your job or the economy shifts, you're still okay. And everything you do on the weekend, and more importantly, during the week, is your decision. Now, the first time that happened to me was very late in my career.

• 12:59Scott Galloway?

  I used to have to get up to work. I used to have to figure out, you know, do shit I didn't want to do. And now, there's three buckets in life. There's things you have to do, right? Your biggest investors in town. It's your, I don't know. It's your anniversary and you have to go to dinner. Not that that isn't great. Not that that isn't something I really look forward to. But there's things you have to do. Then there's things you want to do. What did I want to do? I wanted to go to Che Margaux last Wednesday night and meet up with my friends and get shitty drunk. I wanted to do that. And then there's things you ought to do. Oh, the friends in town who you went to college with and be interested in having dinner. Oh, you know, a friend is having her 50th birthday party. You don't really know her that well,

• 13:43Scott Galloway?

  but she invited you because, you know, she like... And then I make, okay, the key, one of the one of the things about being economically secure is you can eliminate the should bucket. There are a lot of networking events and interesting things. I was invited to go on.

• 13:58Scott Galloway?

  MSNBC yesterday, I've been making a lot of comments about the political situation. You know, I should do that. It'd be good for my brand. Okay, I don't want to. I have no interest in going on for eight minutes and speaking to some anchor on MSNBC about the same fucking thing over and over that they've been talking about all day. So I've taken, I've gotten rid of the should bucket. So your ability to exercise the word should means you're rich. But generally speaking, your passive income is greater than your burn. That is the definition of rich. My father, who between social security and his pension from the Royal Navy makes, I think, $52,000 a year, he spends 48. One, because his son is paying for his, his healthcare. But even before then, he was still in savings

• 14:43Scott Galloway?

  mode. My dad is ruthlessly cheap and he was still saving money at the age of 94. That's rich. I have another friend who ran a very large division of, of a bulge rack investment bank made between three and $10 million a year. In between his ex-wife, his alimony, his home in the Hamptons, his Netflix or his NetJets, Jet Card, I think he spent most, if not all of it. And there was no way he could stop working. His passive income was not greater than his burn. He is not rich. So this is a way of saying, how to become a baller, you figure out a way, a financial path, you have the discipline, you have the skill to make money, have the discipline to save money, and then chart a path towards

• 15:25Scott Galloway?

  a point where your burn will be less than your passive income. That's what it means to be wealthy or rich. And in my view, that probably means you're a baller. Thanks for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Nutraful, the number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement brand used by over one and a half million people. With age comes knowledge, patience, and for some, hair loss. Didn't say it was all good things. And for those who want to do something about it, there's Nutraful. Nutraful has formulas built for men at different life stages. They have Nutraful Men for Guys Age 18 to 49, plus the new Nutraful Men 50 and Older.

• 16:09Scott Galloway?

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• 16:48Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Upwork. Trying to scale your business? At some point, you're probably going to hit a point where you need some help. Sometimes the best way to break through that is bringing in the right talent at the right time. Upwork can help. Upwork is a one-stop platform where you can find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across more than 125 categories. Whether you need specialized skills for a single project or extra support to keep up with demand, it's easy to connect with experienced professionals, review their work, and find the right fit. You can move faster without taking on the commitment of full-time hires. And for businesses that need the very best talent, Upwork Business Plus provides access to the top 1% of freelancers on the platform. AI-powered matching connects you with qualified candidates in under six hours, cutting down the time spent searching.

• 17:31Scott Galloway?

  Upwork also takes care of contracts, payments, and other administrative tasks, so you can spend less time managing logistics and more time focused on what's next. Visit upwork.com/propg right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com/propg to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com slash propg. Upwork.com/propg.

• 17:58Scott Galloway?

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• 18:43Scott Galloway?

  Over 16,000 fast-growing companies like Ramp, Ryder, and Harvey save time and resources while scaling fast with Vanta. Learn more at vanta.com/profg and get $1,000 off. That's spelled V-A-N-T-A dot com slash prof G for $1,000 off.

• 19:07Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Our final question also comes from Reddit. Marian asks,

• 19:13Scott Galloway?

  "How much of the hiring discussion looking for cultural fit and the ideal candidate is really people trying to find fancy concepts for intelligence conscientiousness and motivation?" Okay, so essentially what you're asking is, what is the value of the interview process? I think that interviewing is mostly worthless. Well, okay. There's a culture test, and that is, we like to have everybody provide some input. I mean, almost everyone has blackball power. They don't have the power to hire people, but almost everyone has blackball power. What do we mean by that? Because in a world of remote work, I think it's really important that people get along. People want to spend time with each other. They're motivated to make their own plans to get together. And we're mostly remote. We have... What's interesting is everybody says

• 19:58Scott Galloway?

  young people don't want to work in an office. Our young people organically got a workspace in Brooklyn, and most of them show up pretty much every day. And maybe it's because, I don't know, it's a sample selection bias, and that is the people we have are kind of overeducated, ambitious, very economically motivated young people. But I think it's important that everybody, I don't want to say like each other, but enjoy or can tolerate each other's company because I think it's important in a remote world that people do want to get together on a regular basis in person. And I think it's really nice when they get along. I send my kids, I send my kids, my employees on trips all the time. And I think it's fun for them. I think they look forward to it. I think they brag about it to their friends. And I think it's a huge kind of form of

• 20:41Scott Galloway?

  soft compensation. And so it's important that they at least minimally get along or have enough respect for each other where they could go to Tulum for three or four days and get along and not dread going to dinner with that person. So almost everyone has veto authority, but generally speaking, my total hiring strategy is reference hiring. And that is I got an email today from someone who said, I have someone coming out of MIT this year, and he's just fantastic. And I'll look at his background, I'll ask the team, you know, what do we think? And then have people meet him. But we basically make the decisions on reference hiring. And the nice thing about having a small company is you can do a decent amount of research on any individual. I get fooled all the time in interviewing. I've had the most, I think the best interview I had was a woman who came

• 21:25Scott Galloway?

  out of, I forget where she came out of, AIG or something like that. She came to one meeting with me and then went on disability leave. She claimed she had an ear problem, which is fine, but would show up for all the social events. So clearly, her vertigo or whatever she was suffering with seemed to, seemed to temporarily rescind when there was a social event, but couldn't come in for work and then sued the company after we got acquired and basically got paid for two years after coming into the office for a day. She was clearly gaming the system. You know, pretty much an unethical person. And I thought she was just incredible when I interviewed her. And then other people I've interviewed and thought, God, that person was just brightened up the room by leaving it. But then somebody that's worked with them has said they're outstanding. In sum,

• 22:09Scott Galloway?

  you want to find, anyone they give you as a reference, you don't call. You want to find people that they don't know you're calling, who've worked with them, who will give you a no mercy, no malice appraisal of them. And if somebody I trust says to me, this person's outstanding, I don't care if I have a role or not, I don't care if we need people, I'll hire that person. Because In a company, and this is essentially every company right now, where you're not blessed with an amazing brand or enormous capital, it's all about the people. So, and nobody, nobody can predict the greatness in people except for other people. So, in sum, the interviewing process for us is really something we don't take that seriously. We do it as a sanity

• 22:51Scott Galloway?

  check to make sure this person isn't an asshole and people would like to work with them. But we're mostly entirely reference hiring at this point.

• 23:00Scott Galloway?

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

• 23:19Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thanks for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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